


Nightingale

by RosalindInPants



Category: The Great Library Series - Rachel Caine
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Bathing/Washing, Cuddling & Snuggling, Delirium, Fever, Flashbacks, Foot Massage, Hair Brushing, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Massage, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reading Aloud, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture, Whumptober, expanded canon torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2020-07-31 06:28:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 33,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20110651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RosalindInPants/pseuds/RosalindInPants
Summary: A collection of stories of Wolfe's recovery from his imprisonment and torture in Rome. There will be some significant variance in levels of angst, violence, and fluff between chapters; see chapter summaries for chapter-specific warnings. Chapters containing violent flashbacks will be clearly labeled as such, but since this is dealing with the aftermath of Rome, expect vague references to past torture even in fluffier chapters.CHAPTER ORDER HAS BEEN UPDATED!Chapter order has been adjusted to keep things in chronological order.Current contents:1. Wolfe's Release2. The First Night3. Fever4. Simple Comforts5. Reading in the Sun6. Simple Triggers7. Panic Attack8. Comfort and Memories9. The Artifex Visits10. Reading Aloud11. Forgiveness12. Hidden (NEW)





	1. Wolfe's Release

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wolfe is released from prison and returns home to Santi. Upon seeing the state that his partner is in, Santi gives him a bath while trying to comfort him. No torture flashbacks in this chapter, but there are some detailed wound descriptions, and Wolfe's part makes brief mention of events in the prison earlier in the day and Qualls' general behavior patterns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some relevant quotes:
> 
> "I was there when Wolfe crawled bloody to this door." - Santi, Paper and Fire, chapter 7
> 
> "I saw [Keria] the day they released me from the Basilica Julia prison [...] She brought me home. To you. She left before you found me." - Wolfe, Paper and Fire, chapter 14
> 
> "I have enclosed the last round of direct transcription of Scholar Christopher Wolfe's interrogations. There is little point in wasting your time reading it; there is no variety in his responses to questioning, whatever the particular tools we chose to employ. He rarely speaks at all now. [...] I assure you that if your plan was to break him, he is long past broken. [...] There are limits, and he has reached them. So have I, surprisingly. Therefore I have personally released Scholar Wolfe." _Qualls, Smoke and Iron, ephemera
> 
> "A broken bone heals twice as strong. [...] Santi had bathed him, dried him, clothed him, held him through the night to whisper it in a constant, bracing refrain, because Wolfe had been unable to speak or explain where he'd been."

EPHEMERA

**Excerpt from the personal journal of Scholar Christopher Wolfe.**

**Interdicted to the Black Archives.**

_ "He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger, for he does not get the mastery and suffers pain besides his shame." _

_ In these sleepless nights, I keep coming back to Hesiod’s fable. Its warning that I completely failed to heed. They called me stormcrow, and I thought that put me on the level of Hesiod’s hawk. But I know now that I am merely the nightingale, helpless in its talons. _

**Excerpt from the personal journal of Captain Niccolo Santi.**

**Not yet available in the Codex.**

_ Chris won't speak. Not a word. Remembering that awful old myth from Ovid, I checked his mouth. They didn't cut out his tongue. Thank God they didn't cut out his tongue. Still, he says nothing. Like Tereus, they have broken him and robbed him of his ability to speak and reveal their crimes. But even Philomela found her voice and her revenge, in the end. And powerful though they may be, the Archivist and the Curia are no gods. They will not turn my stormcrow into a nightingale. _

* * *

This latest round of torture had finally driven him completely mad. That was the only possible explanation Wolfe could think of for how he could even imagine himself on a plush velvet seat in a richly-appointed steam carriage, slumped against his mother, the Obscurist Magnus. In his months - years? he'd lost all sense of time - of confinement, he had imagined and dreamed of rescue more times than he could count, but those fantasies always ended with him in Nic's arms, not his mother's.

He would have pulled himself away from her embrace, if he had the strength. If it wouldn't hurt so much to move. Wounded as he was, he had to content himself with the knowledge that he was bleeding on her precious clothes and carriage. 

She had to be at least partially responsible for all that he'd suffered. She was too powerful not to have known. And if she had known, she could have done something.

_ She's here now. She came for you now, _ whispered the traitorous little piece of his heart that still yearned for her love. Maybe that abandoned child within him had conjured this latest illusion. It was a particularly good one; it felt as real as his hallucinations of Santi had, and he had no doubt that like those, this, too, would soon turn into a nightmare. It was already well over halfway there.

His mother cradled his head against her chest, stroking his cheek as she had when he was a child and humming a lullaby. If he hadn't already been shaking, it would have made him shiver.

He wished his tortured imagination would tell him how he'd ended up here. He remembered the day's session with Qualls in vibrant, agonizing detail, but everything after that was a haze. He’d fallen unconscious from the pain. Not unusual. 

Vaguely, he remembered Qualls telling him he was free, but that was even more absurd than the idea of his mother rescuing him. He remembered walking, held up by soldiers to either side, a hood over his head. He remembered being torn apart and reassembled by translation, but that might only be his mind giving him a novel interpretation of his pain.

The carriage hit a bump in the road, jostling him, and he screamed at the jolt of agony that sent through his battered body. He'd long since given up on the foolish notion of holding his silence through pain. It never made any difference whether or not he screamed. Sometimes, Qualls took silence as a challenge.

His mother snapped at the carriage driver to slow down, to be careful, and then she turned her attention back to him. In a voice too soft and gentle to be anything but a delusion, she said, "Shh, Christopher, it will be over soon. You'll be home soon." Her hand kept up its rhythmic stroking, smoothing down his scruffy and overgrown beard. So she was bringing him to the Iron Tower. His mad hallucination was offering him the trade of one prison for another.

But when the carriage came to a stop and the door opened, he was not at the door of the Iron Tower, but a much more humble door, on a quiet street not far from the High Garda compound, deserted in the night. He cursed his mind for tormenting him with that image once again, dangling the hope of warmth and security and Nic before him only to snatch it away when the vision inevitably vanished and left him staring at the stones of his cell wall once more.

"Go on, Christopher. You're home. Nic will take care of you." His mother's arms were pulling back from him, and one of her High Garda bodyguards came to help him out of the seat and down from the carriage to stand in the street on wobbly legs and bloody feet. She might have said more as the soldier released him and he stumbled forward, but he couldn't hear her over the hiss of the carriage and the pounding of his own heart.

The door was there, mere steps away. He made it one more step before his legs gave out and he fell to his hands and knees on the cobblestones. Behind him, the carriage hissed and clanked into motion. He forced himself to his feet again. It felt like stepping on shards of glass, and he didn't care. Even the illusion of the man he loved was worth the pain of walking. Two more steps and he fell again, almost close enough to touch the door. His legs refused to support his weight for even that short distance, so he dragged himself forward on hands and knees until he could reach the door and haul himself up on the door frame to grasp the knob.

It was locked. His key was long gone, confiscated when he was arrested. This dream was forcing him to knock on the door of his own house.

In retrospect, that might have been the moment he started to consider that it might all be real.

He pounded desperately against the thick wood of the door, as loud as he could with weakened arms. It wasn't long before he had to pause and brace himself against the door with both hands to keep himself from falling again. He'd walked some half dozen steps and knocked on a door, and he was breathing like he'd run up the Serapeum stairs. Everything hurt. His legs weren't going to hold him, not even with the support of the door.

He fell. Not down or back, though, but through, as the door swung open.

Nic caught him, and it was the best hallucination of him that Wolfe had conjured yet. Every detail was right: the strength of his arms, the warmth of his body, even the smell of his sweat. Together, they staggered back into the house, and Wolfe didn't care if it was a dream, as long as he never woke from it.

* * *

When the sound of frantic knocking on the door dragged him from sleep, Santi thought it was one of his recruits. Ignoring Zara's advice, he made sure that his new soldiers always knew where to find him in an emergency. He would rather they come to him with what turned out to be a trivial problem than get themselves into real trouble, or worse, fail to address a serious threat quickly enough because they didn't know where to go. They rarely came to him, but when they did, he'd always been glad he'd made himself available, a fact that he reminded himself of as he kicked off the sheets, grabbed a robe, and headed for the door. By the time he got there, the knocking had already stopped. Maybe the recruit was having second thoughts about disturbing the captain in the middle of the night.

He opened the door to find not a young soldier, but a man he had all but given up hope of seeing again. He had only an instant to recognize Christopher Wolfe standing on the other side of the door, and then his beloved was falling forward, and Santi's only thought was to catch him in his arms. The momentum carried him backward, and he turned with it so that his back landed against the wall next to the door, but even that wasn't enough to keep him on his feet. His knees, weak with shock and relief, could not hold both his weight and Christopher's, and he sank down until they sat together in a heap on the floor, clinging to one another with all the strength they had.

Wolfe shook with heavy sobs. Santi's own eyes filled with tears. There was so much he wanted to say, but the only thing that would come out of his mouth was Christopher's name. They were together again, and nothing else mattered.

It was the smell that broke the spell of relief. Not the stench of Chris's unwashed clothes and body - they'd been through the filth of war zones together too many times for that to be much of a deterrence - but the metallic scent of blood. Chris was wounded.

That knowledge was enough to stop Santi's tears as his soldier's instincts took over and pushed his emotions to the side. Looking down at the trembling man in his arms, he noticed, really noticed this time, the tangled mess of his hair, the blood slowly dripping down the side of his face, the ragged and stained clothes, the prominence of ribs. The blood on his fingers as he lifted them from Christopher's side. The sobs that were not, as Santi had first thought, from relief, but from pain. Cursing his own thoughtlessness, he shifted his arms to try to move his partner into a more comfortable position, and the cry that came from Chris as he did so was enough to break his heart. The face he'd so longed to see twisted with pain, and he was the cause of it. 

He couldn't let himself dwell on that. Every minute they just sat here was a minute Chris suffered more than he needed to, a minute more for dirty clothes to contaminate open wounds. "Going to have to pick you up now," he said, fighting to keep his voice steady, "We need to get you cleaned up. You'd like a shower, wouldn't you?" Steeling himself for the pained sounds he knew he would hear, he scooped Chris up in his arms in a bridal carry. The least practical way to move a man, he knew, but he just couldn't stand to follow his training and sling Chris over his shoulder.

Chris didn't say anything to that. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth with the pain of being lifted, and clung to Santi with shaking arms. That was worrying. Even injured, Chris could usually manage some sarcastic remark. More worrying was the fear in his eyes when he opened them again. He was home; he shouldn't still be afraid.

Santi met those frightened eyes as he nudged the door shut with his shoulder, looking away from the smears of blood on it and the ground outside. "Chris," he said softly, "Are we safe here? Are they after you still?" He couldn't imagine Christopher escaping and making it all the way home from wherever they'd kept him in the condition he was in, so he must have been released. But then, what was he so afraid of?

Chris didn't answer. He turned his head toward Santi's shoulder and whimpered, his shaking hands grasping handfuls of Santi's robe. There was something wrong with his grip, something Santi couldn’t quite work out. Santi felt like shivering himself. What could they possibly have done to him to leave him unable to answer such a simple question?

Turning the lock was something of a challenge with Christopher in his arms, but he did it, and then kicked a chair over to the door and wedged it under the knob, just to be safe. That would do, at least until he had Chris taken care of and could better assess the situation.

It was worrying how easy it was to carry Chris to the bathroom. He'd always been on the lean side, but he'd had some muscle on him from field work and training with Santi’s company. He was frighteningly thin now, not quite skin and bone, but too close to it for comfort. Santi added food to the list of things he was going to need to take care of. First the shower, then the wounds, then food. Something easy to digest. There should be some High Garda ration tins in the cabinet that would do. If he focused on the practical steps he needed to take, he didn't have to think too hard about the way Chris was still shaking and crying in his arms.

The bathtub seemed too cold and hard a place to put a man in so much pain, but he needed to be clean before anything else, so Santi set him down as gently as he could, propped up against the side of the tub. But when he tried to move back to help Chris out of his clothes, Chris refused to let go of him, clinging with frantic hands to his robe and sobbing pitifully. 

The panic on his face made Santi want to pull him back into his arms and hold him until those sobs stopped.

_ Wounds. Infection, _ he reminded himself, and laid a gentle hand over the fingers tangled in the fabric of his robe. There was something odd about them that nagged at him, but he made himself focus on the task at hand. "Christopher, my love, I am here. You are safe. We need to get you cleaned up. Can I help you get those clothes off?" He didn't realize until the words were out that he was speaking Italian. Probably had been since Chris fell through the door. For an instant, he was torn between hoping and fearing that his partner's silence was caused by lack of understanding, unlikely though that was for a man so talented at languages who had been fluent in Italian for so long. And then Chris's grasp loosened and he allowed his hand to be pulled away. He'd understood.

Still, Santi switched back to Greek to say, "I'm starting with the shirt. Tell me if it hurts too much." The look Chris gave him was one he never thought he would be so relieved to see. But if Christopher Wolfe could still glare at him like he was a complete idiot, that meant there was hope of recovery.

How the shirt had held together at all was a mystery. The rough, undyed fabric was badly frayed, allowing Santi to simply tear it open in the back and pull it off without having to ask Chris to move too much. Dirty as it was, even if it hadn't been falling apart, he would have thrown it away rather than even consider washing it. 

Looking at the shirt was easier than looking at the man it had been on. Santi threw the thing to the corner and made himself turn his eyes on Christopher's battered body. He'd wrapped his arms protectively around himself, curling to protect his stomach. There were burns, fresh and red and blistering, on his arms in neat rows of small circles. And beneath those burns, there were scars. Layers of wounds and scars, not only on his arms, but on what Santi could see of his chest as well. A smear of blood on the side of the tub suggested that his back was no better. There were spots of blood all over him, most of it dried, making it hard to tell where he was wounded and where he was merely dirty.

Intellectually, Santi had known Chris had been tortured. The Artifex had as much as admitted it when Santi asked for the final time about where Wolfe had gone, promised more as the price of Santi's pursuit of him. There, beneath what looked like rope burn on Christopher's chest, Santi could see the row of evenly spaced scars that matched his own; the Artifex had told the truth about that much, at least. But the implication had been that if Santi would just stop asking, the abuse would stop. Clearly, it hadn't. And knowing and seeing were so very, horribly different.

The scope of the pain was almost too much to comprehend. Santi felt sick with the knowledge of it. One day, he was going to have to find a way to murder the Artifex and whichever of his cronies were responsible for this. Now, though, Christopher needed him, so he ignored the nausea and set to work on removing Christopher's tattered pants, terrified of what he'd see when he got them off. It wasn't as bad as he'd feared. No fresh wounds, just thin, scarred legs with bands of raw, abraded skin around the ankles where cuffs must have been, and rope burns around the thighs. The parts between them looked undamaged, thank God. And then he caught a glimpse of the bottom of one foot as Chris pulled his legs up toward his chest. The skin was red and inflamed, cut and scraped. Amazing that he'd walked on those feet at all, let alone stood at the door for God only knew how long.

Santi threw the pants after the shirt without looking, keeping his eyes and one hand on his shivering partner. He had to be cold, warm as the night was. Could be a fever; that wouldn't be unreasonable, considering the questionable sanitation of the conditions he'd apparently been kept in. That might also explain the dazed look in his eyes. Putting a hand to Christopher's forehead, he tried and failed to determine whether it was warmer than normal, and added a thermometer to the list of supplies to be retrieved. Yes, a thermometer would be good; it would give the opportunity to have a look at Chris’s mouth. He was worried about what he would find there.

He ran his hand over Chris's tangled hair and pressed a kiss to his forehead, not much caring about the dirt or the blood. "I'm going to turn on the water now," he said, reaching for the faucet. He got as far as putting his hand on the knob before he froze, looking back at his lover's burned arms. Water hot enough to help with the shivering was going to hurt on those burns. Water cool enough to soothe the burns wouldn't warm the rest of him. "How hot do you want it?" he asked, hoping for an answer at least in Christopher's expression, if not in words. Words would be better.

Christopher Wolfe, a man who could lecture for hours given the opportunity, put his head down on his knees without saying a thing.

His stomach sinking, Santi turned the water to warm, and when he was satisfied that the temperature would neither burn nor freeze, he flipped the switch to turn on the shower. He'd get the worst of the dirt down the drain, then fill the tub. At least with the moderate temperature, the hot water wouldn't run out too soon. Christopher gasped, then groaned when the water hit him, a sound that could have been either pain or relief. Water the color of rust ran off him. After a moment, he uncurled, just a little, seeming to relax, though he didn't raise his head. Wet clumps of tangled hair obscured his face. Santi squeezed his partner's shoulder. "Chris? All right?" 

No response. To be fair, it was a stupid question. Of course he wasn't all right. And Santi needed to do something about that. First something for the pain, he thought, then a thorough cleaning of those wounds. "I need to go get a few things," he said, speaking calmly and clearly like he would to a panicked civilian in a war zone. "I will not be going far. I will be loud, so you will know where I am. I will be back soon." He tucked Christopher's hair back behind his ear, trying to get a look at his face. His hand came away bloody; there was a cut along Chris's hairline still bleeding.

As Santi began to move back to stand, Chris’s hand shot out, faster than Santi would have thought possible, to grab his arm. The moment Chris’s fingers wrapped around Santi’s arm, Chris howled in pain, even as his hand closed tighter around Santi’s arm. No, not his whole hand. He was using only his thumb and two fingers.

Santi looked down at the hand that clung to him. The first and third fingers bent at an angle nauseating to see. Broken. Broken, and still he held on with all the strength he had left, watching Santi with frantic, terrified eyes.

He couldn’t leave Chris like that. The weak painkillers they had on hand weren’t worth it. He cursed himself for using up the stronger ones he'd been prescribed for the injuries from his... unpleasant encounter with the Artifex. _ Could have taken a day or two off work, then there would be pills left. _ But it was too late for that.

Laying a hand over his partner’s, careful not to touch the broken fingers, he said, “All right, I won’t go. I’ll stay here. Let me get undressed so I can come in with you?”

Chris loosened his fingers only just enough for Santi to pull away. His suspicious gaze followed Santi as he stood and stripped, then went over to the sink to grab Chris’s hairbrush from the cabinet where it had sat too long in its proper place on the shelf instead of being carelessly left on the counter. Only when Santi stepped into the tub did Chris let his head drop with a sigh that might have been relief.

"I am here. I won't leave," Santi promised, climbing into the tub to sit facing his wounded partner. He dropped the hairbrush as Chris threw his arms around him and pulled himself into Santi's lap, one arm around his waist, legs curling up against the side of the tub. That seemed to be enough to exhaust him, as he promptly collapsed, still shivering, against Santi’s chest, resting his head on his shoulder. Santi might have thought him unconscious if not for the rapid pace of his breathing.

The new position gave Santi, for the first time, a look at Christopher’s back. Between tangled clumps of hair much longer than Chris had ever let it grow, he could see some dozen long lacerations, crossing over one another, all partially healed, though the scab on one had ripped open. They didn’t look too deep, at least, but the swollen and reddened edges made him nervous. Those were only the worst of the marks: there were scrapes, too, and welts, and even more scars than his arms.

And all that was nothing compared to what Santi could now see of his beloved’s left hip. There, where there should have been the black ink of his tattoo, was nothing but a burn scar. Not one scar, but overlapping layers of them, as if someone had burned him repeatedly there until there was nothing left of the quill and the gun. Santi could all but feel the burn in his own hip, where his own quill and gun tattoo remained, unblemished. There was no stopping the tears; he was only grateful that the water from the shower would hide them.

What else might someone cruel enough to do that do? Santi’s stomach twisted with what seemed to be all but confirmation of his worst fears about the cause of Chris’s lack of speech. He needed to get a better look at his lover’s mouth. Gently, he tipped Chris’s head upward, murmuring, “Here, let’s see your face. Can I clean you up?”

Still no response.

Santi lathered his hand with the plain, unscented soap that he used for his own wounds and wiped the dirt and blood from his partner’s face with slow, careful strokes. Aside from the cut on his forehead, his face, at least, was uninjured. Chris’s mouth turned upward in a ghost of a smile at the touch, opening slightly to let out a soft sigh. Seizing the opportunity, Santi slipped his finger in, only to yelp in shock as much as pain as Chris bit down, his eyes flying open as his relaxed expression turned to fear and betrayal.

The feel of his lover’s velvety tongue against his finger was enough to make him sob with relief. An intact tongue and a mouth full of teeth. There was no physical cause of Christopher's silence. That knowledge was worth a bitten finger.

“I’m sorry,” he said, keeping his tone calm despite the pain in his finger. “I wanted to check…” his voice hitched. He couldn’t say it. “I was checking for injuries. I won’t do it again. Let me go?” Santi pulled his finger back, and Chris opened his mouth to let it go, snapping it shut again and tucking his chin down against his chest as soon as Santi’s finger was free, a pitiful whine emanating from behind his closed lips.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, inadequate though it felt. Guilt and horror twisted through him. He’d frightened Chris. Someone had hurt Chris enough that his lover's finger in his mouth could frighten him. Santi couldn't let himself ponder that; he had to calm his partner so that he could clean his wounds. "I'm going to wash your hair now. You'd like that, wouldn't you?" He tried not to be too disappointed by the lack of response.

Careful not to jostle Chris too much as he moved, Santi reached for the bottle of shampoo on the ledge beside the tub. Not the plain stuff he used on his own hair, but the thick, sandalwood-scented shampoo that Christopher insisted was necessary for maintaining the silky texture of his long hair. With all the effort he usually put into caring for his hair, he had to be devastated by its current ragged state. It would do him good to have it clean and untangled again.

Just opening the bottle and smelling it again unclenched some of the knot in Santi’s stomach, and it seemed to do the same for Chris, as he relaxed a little, and the whining stopped. Never having been a participant in the routine of caring for his lover’s hair, Santi had no idea how much of the shampoo to use, but he doubted there could be such a thing as overdoing it, under the circumstances. He poured it into his hand until drips ran over his palm and into the tub, then rubbed it into the knotted mess of hair until his hand was empty. Twice he refilled his hand before every clump and strand bubbled with the fragrant soap, and then he put the bottle aside and put both hands to work massaging the stuff in.

Christopher leaned against him while he worked, his body relaxing and the tremors calming, though they didn’t entirely go away. Grateful to have found something that actually seemed to help, Santi scrubbed until the shower washed the bubbles away, and then filled his hand with more shampoo again, and again. When the water flowing down from Chris’s dark hair ran clean, Santi switched to conditioner, working the creamy liquid into the tangled clumps of his lover’s hair and picking out the worst of the tangles with his fingers.

By the time he switched to the hairbrush, Chris had calmed and snuggled against him, nuzzling his chest and letting out little hums of pleasure. He’d stopped shaking. The fear had left his eyes, replaced by a heartbreaking look of wonder and adoration.

But it all went wrong after he filled the tub, planning to clean Chris’s wounds and then let him soak in the warm water. Judging by the marks left on him by ropes and cuffs, he must have been restrained long enough to leave his joints aching. Santi explained what he was going to do while he put away the hairbrush and applied soap to a washcloth. Chris whined a little, and Santi hated that he was already so afraid of the pain of being washed, but he resigned himself to it, knowing it had to be done.

He was ready for cries, screams, tears. He wasn’t ready for a hoarse shriek of shock and horror, or for limbs flailing in a desperate attempt to escape. He was left holding his struggling lover and wondering what in God’s name he could possibly have done wrong. All he could think was that Christopher was reacting instinctively to the pain.

Santi desperately hoped that Christopher was reacting to the pain. The alternatives were more frightening. Leaning close to Chris’s ear, he tried to make his voice as soft and soothing as he could. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so, sorry. Christopher, my dearest, my beloved, I’m sorry, but I have to do this. These need to be cleaned. Please, please hold still for me?” He begged, he pleaded, he apologized more times in under a minute than he would in a typical year.

Chris didn’t respond at first. His arms remained rigid, shaking as he tried to push himself away. He looked up, and the expression on his face was a wild thing, desperate and terrified. Then, all at once, his eyes lost their focus and he went limp in Santi’s arms, his heavy breathing the only sign that he hadn’t completely lost consciousness. Worn out.

Santi took a minute just to hold him, stroking his hair and speaking what reassurances he could, useless as that was. Then he went back to the miserable task of cleaning his beloved’s wounds, knowing there would be no better time. Chris didn’t resist again, though he went stiff and whimpered when Santi touched the worst of the burns. His arms, face, and back were within easy reach, so Santi took care of those first, then carefully shifted their positions so that Chris reclined against the wall of the tub, putting the front of his body in reach.

He had thought there was nothing left to surprise him, but his first glimpse of his partner’s abdomen took his breath away, then filled him with a rage so intense he had to fight the urge to punch the wall. Punching things would be bad. Punching things could startle Chris. But this desecration would need to be avenged.

Written in bloody cuts across Christopher’s stomach, just below his ribs, was a single word: _ heretic _. Written not just once, but many times. The fresh cuts overlapped older scars, sometimes following the lines of them so closely that Santi couldn’t even see the original marks, sometimes veering off at angles that made the writing look sloppy. Over and over, they had carved their accusation into his flesh, putting it where he could never be free of it. By his beliefs, he would carry that word with him to the afterlife. 

The image of Chris bound and struggling as the knife cut each letter into his skin flashed before Santi’s eyes as he cleaned the cuts. The cloth-wrapped fingers he was using to gently wipe dirt and dried blood from the edges of the wounds looked, for an instant, like a knife, blood beading at its tip, and he snatched back his hand, horrified. He stared down at the bloodstained cloth and the hand that held it, blinking until that was all he saw. He looked up at Christopher, shaking, jaws clenched and eyes squeezed shut. And then he gritted his teeth and finished his work, reviewing High Garda first aid procedures in his mind to keep himself from thinking too hard about what he was seeing, hearing, touching.

First clean the wound thoroughly. Then apply the proper medication. Then bandage. Evaluate for signs of infection. Evaluate for excessive blood loss. Evaluate for shock.

Step by step, he reviewed the things he needed to do, again and again until every wound was clean. And then he drained the tub, wrapped his beloved in towels, and carried him to the bedroom.


	2. The First Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wolfe is home and safe, but after experiencing realistic hallucinations in prison, he's having a hard time believing that anything he's seeing is real.  
Santi, beginning to realize just how bad things are, takes care of Wolfe through the night.
> 
> This chapter deals with Wolfe's memories of physical and psychological torture and being drugged.

There was not yet enough data to draw an accurate conclusion. That was what Wolfe told himself in a moment of lucidity as he lay in his own bed on a towel softer than anything he’d touched in months while the man he loved patted him dry. Or at least, a bed that seemed like his own and a man who he thought was Niccolo Santi. It was important to remember that it could be an illusion that would vanish the moment he gave it his trust.

He feared what he would find beneath the illusion. Empty air? He could bear that again, if it came to it. He’d thought that would be his fate when Nic briefly left him alone on the bed, and still wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that Nic had returned with his arms full of medical supplies and blankets. It should have reassured him that the man he saw really was Nic, but he had to give all possibilities equal consideration. There might well be a man, but that man could be someone other than who he appeared to be. He'd feared that through the pain of having his cuts and burns cleaned in the shower, though Nic had been too gentle and apologetic about it to be anyone but himself. And if he believed, really believed, in this image of Nic, only to have it give way to the shadowy gray form of his tormentor, it would be agony beyond anything he had yet endured. It would break what little remained of him.

And so the rational, suspicious part of his mind warred with the part of him that had longed for his lover for every minute of every day they had been apart. The part of him that reached out for Nic as he tucked a dry towel around Wolfe’s shivering body.

Nic caught his outstretched hand and smiled the smile Wolfe had so desperately missed in the darkness of the prison. “You need to be still,” he said, kissing the back of Wolfe’s hand and lowering it gently down to the bed. “You’re going to hurt yourself. You can rest now. Let me take care of you.” He brought his hand up to Wolfe’s forehead and frowned. 

Wolfe didn’t like that frown, the way it made his face wrinkle. He wanted Nic’s smile back. But the frown looked real, and it wasn’t something he usually imagined. A useful data point, that.

“You’re getting warmer,” Nic said, and that seemed an odd observation, because Wolfe felt the opposite of warm. “It has to be a fever. Here, this will help.”

The hand left Wolfe’s forehead, and he lifted his head to follow it, only to freeze in terror at what he saw. Nic was picking up a bottle of pills. Pills were never good. As Wolfe watched, he shook two out into his hand and brought them to Wolfe’s lips. “They’ll help a little with the pain, too. I’m sorry I don’t have anything stronger.”

Instinctively, Wolfe let the pills into his mouth and tucked them under his tongue. He swallowed only saliva, and waited to see if Nic - the man who looked like Nic - would check under his tongue. It seemed as good a test as any of the reality of what he was seeing, hearing, feeling. Qualls would check. The guards usually checked, though they could be lazy enough in their duties to make the gamble of hiding pills worthwhile. Nic wouldn’t check.

Nic didn’t check. He only put down the pill bottle and picked up another bottle, clear glass filled with clear liquid, the shape of it achingly familiar. Vodka. In memory of the night they’d fallen in love in Russia, they always kept a bottle in the cabinet. “I know we aren’t supposed to mix this with painkillers,” Nic said, the smile returning to his face, “But if anything calls for strong Russian medicine, it’s this.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, he wrapped an arm around Wolfe’s shoulders, avoiding the cuts there as best he could, to lift him upright enough to drink.

Like a trusting fool, Wolfe leaned into that embrace, looking wonderingly up at the man he loved. Even after all these years, Nic was still so beautiful, the reality of him better than the dreams that had held him through the horrors of the prison. Like a trusting fool, Wolfe let his mouth open at the mention of “strong Russian medicine.”

The vodka smelled real. The bit that splashed across his lips tasted of burning alcohol and beloved memories. He came so close to giving in to the temptation to drink deeply of it, nearly swallowed the two pills he’d hidden under his tongue. But he caught himself, remembered that alcohol could conceal less pleasant drugs, and turned away from the bottle. If Qualls wanted to drug him, he’d have to do it by force.

He fully expected to have his head yanked back and his jaw pried open. He expected punishment in whatever brutal form it would take this time. More lashes across his back, chains to bind his limbs in unnatural positions. Fingers digging into open wounds. Rations withheld. Such was the price of resistance, and it was a price he was willing to pay. If he made them hurt him enough, he would be in no condition for Qualls to attempt any of his more subtle tricks.

The fear had him so tightly in its grip that the smell of the ointment caught him off guard. It wasn’t a pleasant smell, not like the rich sandalwood he could still smell on his hair, or the hint of pine-scented shaving lotion that lingered on Nic no matter how many hours it had been since he last shaved, or even the musky smell of Nic’s sweat. This was bitter and medicinal and a little greasy, but it brought with it warm memories. It smelled like the locker room at the High Garda compound where they treated each other’s scrapes after training exercises and the Medica tents where he’d sat too many times at Nic’s bedside. It smelled like Nic fussing over Wolfe’s injuries and dismissing concerns about his own.

And Nic was there to fuss over him again. He was talking, Wolfe realized. Had been for a while. “Shh, love, hold still for me. I’m going to take care of these wounds on your back.” Holding Wolfe upright with one arm, he used his other hand to smear what seemed like the entire jar of ointment over Wolfe’s back, his fingers quick and light, barely touching the torn skin.

It was Nic, it had to be Nic. The guards never handled him so gently. Qualls could be gentle, but… Wolfe couldn’t suppress a violent shudder, a sharp cry. The torturer’s gentleness had an edge of cruelty that Nic’s didn’t.

_ It could be a new guard, _ his paranoia whispered, _ one not yet hardened by this place. It could be a trick. Another lie. _

But Nic was apologizing for the pain, holding him and stroking his hair, trying to soothe him. Who else would do that?

_Yes, who would try to deceive you with false reassurances? Don't be a fool._

While Nic laid him back down on the bed and pulled back the towel to apply medicine to the marks left by restraints on Wolfe’s legs, Wolfe searched for the flaw that would prove this all a lie. Nic looked like himself, acted like himself. And the texture of him was right. The rough stubble of his chin when he leaned in for a soft kiss on the forehead, the soft hair on the arms that held Wolfe with such care, even the calluses on his ointment-slick hands all were as they should be. 

_ You’ve imagined those before. _ But not like this. Not touching his wounded body. In dreams, he wasn’t wounded.

And Nic voice, thick with emotion, murmuring soft reassurances, was perfect too. “There. Just a little more. That feels better, doesn’t it?” He had switched back to Italian, the rhythms of it as soothing as his touch.

_ Dreams can speak Italian, too. Qualls can speak Italian. _

But it was the way he lifted Wolfe’s hand, so very careful of the broken fingers, that swept Wolfe’s doubts away. He pulled a chair over to sit right beside the bed, where he could pick Wolfe’s hand up with his own beneath it, supporting wrist and palm without handling the fractured fingers. Qualls would have touched the fingers, but Nic didn’t, not right away. He took a moment to examine them, turning Wolfe’s hand over and bending to kiss the palm.

There were tears glittering in his eyes and an undercurrent of anger beneath the grief in his voice as he spoke. “I will kill the one who did this. No one is ever going to hurt you like this again.” He drew in a sharp breath, and kissed Wolfe’s palm again. “I need to straighten these to splint them. It will be painful, and I am sorry, but when they are splinted, they will heal. Can I give you more vodka first?”

He was only doing it to test his thesis. That was the excuse Wolfe made for himself as he nodded and waited while Nic picked up the bottle and helped him upright again to drink. The smell of alcohol washed over him when the bottle came near, and that was nothing compared to the taste. It burned like fire in his throat, but it was a good fire, a fire that warmed him just as it had so many years ago in Russia. He might never have tasted anything so good in his life. Wolfe let his paranoia slip away while he gulped it down. He didn’t even notice when he swallowed the pills.

He could have kept drinking forever, but after a few gulps, Nic drew the bottle back and replaced the lid, cutting off the lovely aroma of it. 

“Not too much at once, my love. It will upset your stomach. We have to do the hard part now. I’m sorry.” He held out a rolled washcloth, and, when Wolfe stared at him in blank confusion, said, “To bite on. Like we have soldiers do in the field when we can’t wait for a Medica. Remember that time Torres broke her leg in France?”

Faintly, he did. The wounded soldier, a rolled-up bit of cloth in her mouth, Nic and Zara grasping her leg. The grinding of bone. A gruesome affair, all of it, and yet, kinder than anything he’d grown accustomed to in the prison. He let Nic slide the rag between his teeth and bit experimentally at it. There was a certain satisfaction, if not relief, in clenching it between his teeth.

“I am going to straighten this finger now,” Nic said, soft and steady, holding Wolfe’s hand and placing his fingers lightly on the broken index finger. “I am going to make sure the bone is straight, and then I will splint it. Then it will heal, and it will be stronger. A broken bone heals twice as strong.”

That was a nice thought. He wondered if it was true. He began to consider how he might research the truth of that statement, but then Nic’s fingers tightened around his, and a bolt of pain shot through him, shattering his thoughts.

It drew a hoarse and ragged scream from him, as much from shock and betrayal as from the pain itself. He strained against the hand that held his wrist, pathetically weak. Unable to free himself.

Everything he thought he had seen, still thought he was seeing - his mother, his home, his lover - all were nothing more than hallucinations. Stronger illusions than he could have created on his own, so he must have been injected with some new drug while he was unconscious. Something to taunt him with the things he had lost and intensify the pain to come. Fool that he was, he'd probably just swallowed another dose of it.

And more pain would be coming. He knew the pattern of this so terribly well. The torture always came in phases. First came the room at the end of the hall with its machines and its tools. Then, back in his cell, came the mockery of care, the scrubbing and the stitching and the stinging medicines that kept the pain fresh and sharp. Qualls hovering over him and speaking soothingly as he tended to the wounds that he had inflicted. The voice still echoed in his mind. _ “Hush, Scholar, it will be done soon, and when it’s over, you will cooperate, won’t you? I wouldn’t have to do this if you would just cooperate.”_

But there was another voice, too, gentle and close to his ear. “It’s done now. Christopher. It’s done. You will heal. A broken bone heals twice as strong.” Nic’s voice. 

The pulling on his fingers had stopped. He hadn’t noticed at first through the reverberations of pain, but it had stopped. There was a soft mattress under him, and a gentle hand stroking his cheek. It didn’t fit the pattern of the prison. It fit an older pattern, one he’d thought he would never fit himself into again. 

Nic - the man who looked like Nic, sounded like Nic, smelled like Nic, had to be Nic - was still speaking, but the words had stopped making sense. “A broken bone heals twice as strong. A broken bone heals twice as strong.” Wolfe couldn’t wrap his mind around the meaning of it, but the sound was an anchor, something to cling to through the storm of pain.

He looked up into his lover’s face, trying to find the data point that would let him draw the conclusion he so desperately wanted to draw, but his vision blurred. His eyes drifted closed. With his last rational thought, he hoped that unconsciousness would be merciful enough to come for him.

* * *

"A broken bone heals twice as strong. A broken bone heals twice as strong.”

The words seemed to comfort Chris, so Santi kept saying them. Santi thought he understood. They were a promise that he could recover from what had been done to him. He _ would _ recover.

Christopher Wolfe had never in his life been such a cooperative and unresisting patient. Chris had just enough Medica training to infuriate the Medicas who had the misfortune of treating him with ceaseless questions and criticism, and he rarely had the patience to sit still half as long as he ought to. Those Medicas would be delighted to see him lying so still and silent, barely conscious, his only protests feeble whimpers and slight tensing of muscles. Santi would give anything to have Chris snap at him about his inferior bandaging technique. Even an irritable glare would be deeply satisfying.

But Chris hardly even opened his eyes. When the bandaging was done and Santi replaced the towels that had covered him with blankets, Chris was so still that Santi was sure he’d fallen asleep.

“I’m going to go find a can of soup for you,” he said, brushing too-long strands of hair from his partner’s face. “I’ll make tea, too. With milk and sugar, the way you like it.”

He stood, or would have stood, but Chris sat halfway up and lunged for him, crying out as he closed his hands around Santi’s arm, trying to hold on with the splinted fingers. 

Santi settled back on the bed. Put his arms around his beloved and kissed his forehead. “All right. All right, I’ll stay here. I won’t leave you. Let’s get you comfortable again.”

He eased Chirs back down and tucked the blankets around him again while Chris pulled his hands against his chest, whimpering and shivering.

Laying down beside Christopher, Santi took his trembling hand and rubbed the palm with his thumb the way he did when Chris had spent a long day writing. “I know it hurts, my love. But you will heal. A broken bone heals twice as strong.” Very lightly, he traced his fingers over his lover’s splinted ones. “A broken bone heals twice as strong.” He let his hand drift, feather-light, over Christopher’s arms, his chest, his stomach, all while repeating, again and again, “A broken bone heals twice as strong.”

Christopher’s dark eyes stayed open, full of wonder, following Santi’s hand.

“Yes, I promise, you will heal,” Santi said, bringing his hand up to rest on an uninjured spot on Chris’s shoulder, his arm lying across a narrow path between burns and cuts on Chris’s chest. He wanted to pull his beloved into a tighter embrace, but that would put pressure on his wounds, so he settled for shifting his head onto Chris’s pillow to lean his forehead against Chris’s, looking right into his wide eyes.

“Rest, my love,” he whispered. “I am here. Rest and heal. A broken bone heals twice as strong.”

He repeated the words over and over until Christopher’s eyes fluttered shut, his body stilled, and his breathing grew slow and steady. He waited, then, to be certain his lover was asleep, and was glad for his patience when, just as he thought he might be able to get up, Chris cried out and reached for him again. 

Hours passed, and the cycle repeated. Chris drifted in and out of awareness, but each time it seemed he might at last have found sleep, some nightmare or memory, or the pain of his wounds, jarred him from it in a fit of screaming and flailing, trembling and sobbing.

Exhaustion tugged at Santi, but he didn’t sleep. Couldn’t. Chris needed him, and so he was there, whispering the only words he could think to say.

“A broken bone heals twice as strong. A broken bone heals twice as strong.”

He watched Chris's face and the rise and fall of his chest. He watched the hands move on the clock. He watched the light of dawn creep in around the curtains. More than once, his hands twitched toward his Codex, waiting on the nightstand. They needed a Medica. He had no doubt of that. But if Chris hadn’t been released… if somehow, in the state he was in, he’d escaped…

Santi knew the Artifex was monitoring his Codex, enforcing his promise to stop looking for Chris. If Chris had escaped, the Artifex would be watching Santi’s correspondence for that, too.

So he waited. He stayed with the man he loved, and he waited until the hands of the clock showed that he would be expected to report for duty in an hour. Then, and only then, did he open his Codex and write two brief notes, identical, to his first lieutenant and to one of his company’s Medicas.

_ Woke up with a nasty stomachache. I won’t be able to report for duty today. _

It was a plausible excuse. It was also a code, known only to the Medica he’d addressed the note to, established when she’d stitched up his cuts after his warning from the Artifex. She would come as soon as she could without arousing suspicion.

Until then, he turned his attention back to Christopher, again stirring in his sleep, trembling and wrapping his arms around his bandaged stomach.

“Shh, love, I am here. Rest and heal. A broken bone heals twice as strong.”

If he said it enough times, maybe they both could believe it.


	3. Fever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The day after his return home, a delirious Wolfe gets some desperately needed medical treatment and pain medication while Santi continues to care for him.
> 
> No flashbacks in this chapter, but vague references to things that happened in Rome and a bit of suicidal thinking.

Wolfe drifted between waking and dreaming, and he could not tell one from the other.

_ Home _ . Softness and warmth. Some of that warmth pulling away. Nic. Getting up to leave.  _ No _ . He reached out, cried out, hurt in more ways than he could grasp. The warmth returned. Nic’s body, close. Nic’s arm around him. Lips on his cheek. Soft words.

_ Prison _ . Hard wood and sharp steel. Couldn’t move. Pain. Echoing screams. His.  _ No, please, no _ . The pain didn’t stop. The pain never stopped.

_ Home _ . Fingers in his hair. Clean hair, smooth against his neck. Nic’s gentle voice. A heavy blanket tucked around his shoulders. Cold. So cold. He shivered.

_ Prison _ . Bare, cold stone. Dark. He curled into a ball. No warmer. Pain in his stomach. Hunger. Eyes closed, he reached out, and Nic was there. Warm. Safe.

_ Home _ . Red. Bright red behind his eyelids. Light. Too much light. He put his hand over his eyes.

Feet shuffled. Fabric rustled. Light dimmed. He did not open his eyes. Nothing good ever came of that.

He reached out, and Nic was not there. A voice that was not Nic’s spoke from nearby.

He knew the voice, faintly. Couldn’t place it. Not Nic. Not Qualls. Not a guard.

There had been more voices in his life, once, but that was very far away. He couldn’t hold onto the thought. That was fine. He would drift away again soon.

The voice spoke again. Persistent. A bad sign, that. Persistent voices meant he didn’t get to sleep.

“Scholar Wolfe? Please wake up. I am here to help.”

Lies. Probably lies. The voices usually lied. He tried to roll away from it, but moving hurt too much. He groaned.

A gentle hand touched his shoulder. Not Nic’s, it was too small. Not Qualls, either. Could be a guard. “Scholar Wolfe, this is Medica Ishida, with Captain Santi’s company. I am here to help. Can you open your eyes?”

Could he? Yes. Should he? No. But she’d said Nic’s name. Maybe that meant Nic was there.

He wanted Nic enough to open his eyes.

No Nic. Only a round face framed by very short black hair. He closed his eyes again.

“Thank you, Scholar Wolfe. Before I examine you, I would like to ask you a few questions. Can you speak?”

He’d thought he was cold before, but no, that had been sweltering heat compared to the ice that ran through his veins now. Questions. Of course there would be questions. There were always questions. Squeezing his eyes shut tighter, he whimpered, willing this to be a nightmare. If it was a nightmare, it might end.

Reality was never so kind.

“I know you are in pain, Scholar. I promise, I will help soon, but we must follow procedure. I need to make sure you are safe. Do not be afraid. Captain Santi is not here. If there is anything you are afraid to say in front of him, you can tell me now.”

He didn’t respond. Even if he had been able to talk, the words made no sense.

There was a long pause. Long enough for Wolfe to think the dream might be ending. But the voice spoke again, “Because you are not responding, I am going to proceed with the examination now. Do you want Captain Santi here while I examine you?”

Did he want…? The question sounded wrong. The voice was the Medica’s, but those words… those words belonged to Qualls. Wolfe could hear the echoes.

_ You want your Captain Santi, don’t you? _

He wanted Nic. He wanted Nic more than anything. He was so cold. He hurt so badly. Nic would make it better. But that was the cruelty of it. If Nic were with him, Nic would be  _ there _ . In the dark. In pain.

He would never be broken enough to want that.

Sobs welled up in his chest. Painful. Ugly. Unstoppable. He curled himself into as tight a ball as his broken body was capable of, and he waited for the punishment that would come for his refusal to answer.

There were footsteps. Retreating. Muffled voices. More footsteps. Approaching.

Terrified, he waited. It was all he could do. There had been times in his long captivity when he was too weak to fight, too tired to resist. Times when he held his hands out for the chains. Times when he climbed up onto the table and held still as the straps were tightened. In stronger moments, he was ashamed of those times. But he was not strong now.

The mattress beside him dipped, and Nic’s hand touched his face. Illusion or reality, he couldn’t say, but the shape and texture were right. Nic’s forehead pressed against his, warm as sunlight, and Nic’s breath tickled his nose.

Nic’s foul morning breath. He hadn’t brushed his teeth. Wolfe never thought he would be so relieved to smell that.

“Shh, Chris, I’m here. You’re safe. You remember Ishida, don’t you? She’s going to have a look at your wounds, that’s all. Can I take your robe off?”

Things sounded very reasonable, when Nic said them. Nic was there. He trusted Nic. He let his muscles unclench and his body uncurl, groaning with the pain. Nic kept murmuring soft reassurances while pulling Wolfe’s arms through the sleeves of the robe he’d dressed him in. When he was done, he held Wolfe’ hand.

Wolfe’s whole body was ice, except for that hand. Even the burning in his wounds seemed to cool, the pain turning sharp and crystalline. Surrounded by softness and warmth, he froze.

He lay still and flat and naked. Strange fingers probed him. He knew those feelings too well. There were no ropes, no straps, no chains. But he was trapped all the same.

A shrill, pitiful whine escaped his lips.

Nic’s voice stopped its steady stream of meaningless comfort. “Can’t you give him something for the pain first?”

“You didn’t already?”

“A few swallows of vodka and two aspirin, hours ago. I didn’t have anything else to give him.”

“But what about…?” She sighed. Her hands lifted away. “Of course. That’s how you were back on your feet so quickly after... I’ll prepare an injection. Amaterasu only knows if he can keep pills down, anyway. Here, check his temperature for me while I do that.”

Nic’s weight shifted beside Wolfe. He cupped Wolfe’s cheek with one hand and brought the glass tip of the thermometer to his lips with the other. “Chris, love, open your mouth for me?”

For Nic, he did. Only wide enough to let the thermometer in. 

Thin glass. Silvery mercury rising. It would shatter if he bit it. Probably not enough mercury to kill him if he swallowed it, but shards of glass might do the job. Painfully, though. Not ideal. But an option. It was important to have options.

Such strange directions his thoughts drifted in. He didn’t think he wanted to die. Not now.

Nic withdrew the thermometer and held it up for the Medica to see. Wolfe couldn’t make out the marks along the side, but the mercury looked high.

“Could be worse. You’ll want to watch it, but it isn’t high enough to be dangerous,” Ishida said with a shrug. 

There were two syringes in her hands. Wolfe’s gaze caught on them. Translucent liquids. Shining glass. Sharp needles. His heart raced. He reached for Nic.

Nic caught his hand, held it gently, avoiding the wounded fingers. Looked up at Ishida.

The Medica crouched beside the bed to be at eye level with Wolfe. Holding the first syringe up, she said, “This is an analgesic. It should work within half an hour. It may make you drowsy, but I do not think that is a bad thing, at the moment. I would prefer to give this with your consent, Scholar Wolfe. You can nod for yes, shake your head for no.”

It took Wolfe a moment to wrap his mind around that. Pain relief. She was offering him pain relief. She was  _ asking his permission _ to relieve his pain. That made no sense. No one ever asked his permission to  _ cause  _ him pain. No one asked his permission for anything, anymore. Qualls had made it very, very clear that what he wanted no longer mattered.

The needle seemed to shine, to grow ever larger. Of course. It was a lie. He knew too well what needles meant. They didn’t relieve pain. He shivered, tightening his grip on Nic’s hand.

“I’m not sure he understands me,” Ishida said softly, looking at Nic.

Nic cupped Wolfe’s cheek again, his fingers curling into Wolfe’s overgrown beard. “ _ Amore mio _ , you understand, don’t you? You want the pain to stop, don’t you?” Such a pleading tone in his voice. Such worry. His face wrinkled with it. Wrinkles at the corners of his mouth. Wrinkles between his brows.

Wolfe didn’t like that. Nic kept frowning, and Wolfe didn’t like it. So many nights of missing Nic’s smile, dreaming of Nic’s smile, and now that he had Nic back, all he got was that frown.

He wanted Nic’s smile back. Nic wanted… wanted what? Wanted him to nod? He could do that. Just a small nod. For Nic.

Ah, there was the smile. He barely felt the needle, looking at that smile.

The Medica said something about antibiotics. There was the prick of a second needle.

Nic kept smiling, speaking softly. His hand moved from Wolfe’s cheek to his hair, and, oh, that felt good.

And then came the strange hands. The lifting bandages. The probing fingers. But Nic was there. That made it all easier to endure.

* * *

Santi could tell when the painkillers kicked in because that was when Chris’s whines and whimpers quieted and his eyes lost focus, the pupils going wide before they fluttered closed. He wasn’t quite asleep. His body was too rigid for that, his grip too tight on Santi’s hand.

Ishida was almost through with her examination, having rolled Chris onto his side with Santi’s help to get a look at his back. Santi didn’t watch. She wasn’t rough with her patients as some Medicas could be, but still he couldn’t stand to see her hands on Chris’s too-thin body or the wounds he’d so recently bandaged. It was bad enough to listen to her cataloging the wounds aloud as she worked, each one a fresh dagger to Santi’s heart.

He’d held onto the flimsiest hope that he might have overreacted, that he was just worrying too much about Chris again. But no, if anything, Chris was in worse condition than he’d thought. High Garda Medicas weren’t easily rattled. He’d seen Ishida ease the passing of soldiers mortally wounded in Greek fire attacks without flinching. There was real horror on her face now.

After letting her take Chris’s hand to examine it, Santi went to wipe the sweat from his partner’s brow with his sleeve. Stopped with a jolt when his fingers grasped only bare skin where his sleeve should have been. Had to look down to confirm that he had at least put on pants before answering the door, and was relieved to see a stained pair of pajama pants covering his legs.

Ishida met his eyes when he looked up and gave him a sympathetic smile. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, Captain. You’ve had a rough night.”

Santi looked away, shaking his head. “It was worse for him.” He found a corner of the bedsheet to wipe Chris’s face, and checked while he was at it that the blankets were tucked comfortably around him. He’d just done that. But Chris was still shivering.

“You made it better. A lot more of these wounds would be infected if you hadn’t cleaned them so well. And you did a good job with these splints, too.”

“So he’ll make a full recovery?” Santi asked, looking up at her again, only to feel his stomach sink when she looked away.

“I can’t promise that. Here, look at his finger.” She held up Chris’s hand, and Santi looked down at the finger, one of the splinted ones, trying to see what she was talking about. “Touch this spot.”

He pressed the tip of his finger, very gently, against the spot that she indicated, down below the knuckle, lower than the break he’d splinted. When she pushed it down a little harder, he felt a ridge of bone. He looked up, confused.

“It was broken there, too. Months ago, probably. This was calculated. All of it.” She left Chris’s hand in Santi’s and turned back to her bag of supplies. “I don’t think these fingers  _ can _ heal straight. He may still have use of them, but they won’t be the same. It’s too soon to tell what impact the burns will have. He could lose mobility if the skin heals badly. There’s also the loss of muscle mass, and I cannot even begin to speculate on his mental state. Don’t set your hopes too high.”

Anger sparked at that, and he said, with too much force, “What, you think he’s weak? Nine war zones. Years of field work. One of the brightest minds in the world. And you think this will break him?”

Ishida turned to set a small glass vial on the nightstand. Her voice was very soft, and very sad. “It already has broken him. Can’t you see that, Nic? What remains to be seen is whether he can be put back together. You put the soup on, like I asked?” She didn’t wait for an answer before leaving the room at the brisk pace she shared with every Medica Santi had ever met.

Santi looked down at Christopher, the beauty and the horror of him. Every detail of his face was so achingly familiar, and yet even without a single scar there, still so clearly marked by the abuse he had suffered. The graceful sweep of his cheekbones remained unchanged, but the flesh of those cheeks was pale and sunken. His eyes, glassy and half-lidded, still held their rich, deep color, haunted as they had become.

Broken. He’d said it himself, hadn’t he, while Chris trembled in his arms through the night?  _ A broken bone heals twice as strong. _ And of course Chris would heal. How could Ishida even think of doubting it?

How could  _ he _ even think of doubting it?

Beside him, Chris shifted, his hazy eyes searching, seeking, the pupils unfocused. His good fingers tightened around Santi’s hand.

“I’m here,” Santi said, running his fingers through Chris’s hair. So long now, longer than he’d had it in years, and already tangling. Chris leaned his head into the touch with a soft hum of pleasure that loosened the knot of worry in Santi’s gut. Even such a small sign that Chris was feeling better came as a relief. Smiling, he kept up the petting. “The hard part is over now. Ishida is getting you some soup. You must be hungry.”

Chris looked up at him with an unreadable expression.

“He may not feel it,” Ishida said, returning with a bowl of soup in each hand. “If it’s been long enough since he last ate, he might have stopped feeling the hunger. You will need to be careful about feeding him at first. Small servings, rich in nutrition, easy to digest. Don’t overwhelm his system. Can you help him sit up?”

While Santi helped Chris into an upright position, propped up by pillows, Ishida picked up the glass vial she had left on the nightstand and showed it to them both. “This is a sedative. I would recommend a dose to encourage restful sleep. May I mix it into your soup, Scholar Wolfe?”

Chris looked not to her, but to Santi, dazed eyes struggling to focus, full of uncertainty.

The weight of his trust was crushing. “You need to sleep, love,” Santi said, putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Let her give you the medicine?”

Chris nodded, and Ishida measured the clear liquid into the bowl before passing the bowl to Santi. “Help him with that,” she said.

Chris caught her meaning faster than Santi did, lifting his wounded hands with an awful look of shame on his face. 

"Do you want to try?" Santi asked, holding out the spoon, though he already knew the answer. Those hands wouldn't be able to hold a spoon. Even the effort of lifting them from his lap made them shake.

With a sound of wordless frustration, Chris let his hands drop back to his lap, eyes downcast.

Seeing him so helpless broke Santi's heart. His expression when Santi brought the spoon to his lips was worse. Like he had never tasted anything so good. His eyes widened, and when Santi withdrew the spoon, he leaned forward as if to chase it before abruptly sitting back against the pillows, his face reddening.

Santi refilled the spoon and fed his partner another mouthful. He couldn’t begin to think of what to say. Reassurances would only call attention to Christopher’s condition. Praise would be too patronizing. But the silence had such weight.

Ishida was the one to break it. “I’m going to need to return to base for afternoon rounds soon. I’ll leave some medications, enough for the next few days. I assume you would prefer that I write out the dosing instructions rather than send them to your Codex?”

They’d talked about all of this. Months ago, when Santi was brought into the infirmary by a group of soldiers who claimed to have rescued him from Burners. Soldiers paid off by the Artifex Magnus, Santi suspected, though of course there would never be any proof. Ishida had taken one look at his wounds and declared the story about Burners to be a lie. She hadn’t asked for the truth, and he hadn’t given it, but her suspicions were accurate enough. She was the only one who knew. He hadn’t even dared to tell Zara. The Artifex had ears everywhere. And if the Archivist himself was involved...

“Please,” he said. “You can use the paper from the desk there.”

With a nod, she sat at the corner desk and took up a pen. While she wrote, Santi scooped up more soup, making sure to get a chunk of tofu on the spoon, and offered it to Chris. “It’s all right, my love,” he whispered in Italian. “Enjoy it. You haven’t had anything to eat in a while, have you?”

Chris just looked down at the bowl. Not a hint of emotion on his face, as if he'd walled himself off. Only the opening of his mouth each time the spoon came near betrayed his hunger. By the time the soup was half gone, he was yawning. A few more spoonfuls, and his head lolled forward, only to snap upright again with a look of panic, his whole body starting to shake.

Putting the bowl down on the nightstand beside his own untouched bowl, Santi held Christopher’s shoulders to steady him. “Breathe, love, nice and slow. You’re all right. Just getting sleepy. Can you eat a little more for me?”

Turning from the desk, Ishida said, “Don’t force it. Let him rest if he’s ready.”

“Is that what you want, love? To sleep?” Santi asked.

Terror flared in Chris’s eyes, and he drew himself upright, shaking harder with the effort. He whined, a thin and frightened sound muffled by closed lips. What in the names of all his gods had they done to him to make him fear sleep?

Santi wrapped him in a cautious embrace, hoping he was right about the safest places to put his arms. “Shh, it’s all right. I’m here. I’ll keep you safe. I won’t let anyone hurt you. You can sleep.” Slowly, he shifted the pillows and lowered Chris down, kissing his cheeks and forehead. Still so hot and sweaty. “Rest, love,” he whispered. “I’ll be right here.”

Though he whimpered a little, Chris didn’t fight the change in position. His arms wrapped around Santi’s shoulders, and he let out a sigh, his breaths slowing as the drug overpowered his resistance. Soon enough, his grip loosened, and Santi caught his arms to lower them gently down to the bed at his sides.

When Santi sat up, he saw that Ishida had turned back to the desk, tapping her pen on the page as if in thought. At the sound of the bedsprings creaking, she turned again. “Asleep?” she asked.

Santi wiped Chris’s sweaty face with the sheet. Not even so much as a twitch in response. “Yes.”

“Good.” Setting down the pen, the Medica rose to her feet. “I’ve left you notes on everything you’ll need to know and a week’s supply of the medications he’ll need. And I’m going to recommend that you take a dose of sedative as well.”

“Why…?” he began, then shook his head. “No. Out of the question.” He needed to be ready at a moment’s notice if Chris woke in distress. He needed to be ready if anyone came for Chris.

Ishida looked down at him, eyebrows raised. “He’s going to need a lot from you until he recovers. You won’t do him any good if you wear yourself down to the bone. Rest now, while he’s asleep. There won’t be a better time.” She reached into her bag and took out another bottle of pills. “These are a lower dose than what I gave him. You’ll wake before he does. Think about it at least. Please, Nic?”

He let her press the bottle into his hand and stood to walk her to the door. Making sure it was properly locked behind her seemed more important now than ever. “You’ll file medical leave for me?”

“Already done. Conveniently, we’ve had an outbreak of food poisoning, probably bad fish from the market by the docks. We can stretch that out to about a week. Not nearly enough time for him to recover, but it should be enough for you to work out what to do next.”

He should have had an answer already. A good strategist always thought several moves ahead. But even the thought of working that problem out felt like a heavy weight on his shoulders, and they reached the door before he could think of a thing to say. “Thank you,” he said, pausing with his hand on the knob. “Truly. Even if this is all you can do…”

“It isn’t,” she said, cutting him off sharply. “I won’t abandon a patient. Don’t even suggest that I might. I will be back to check on him.” A smile crept over her face. “I have to monitor my captain’s severe food poisoning, after all.”

“Of course.” He let her out and locked the door behind her. To be safe, he pushed a bookcase against it, and another against the back door. More than likely, if anyone was pursuing Chris, they would have come by now. That didn’t mean he trusted anything to chance.

Returning to the bedroom, he left the pills Ishida had given him on the nightstand and ate his bowl of soup without tasting it, watching Chris all the while. His partner looked more peaceful than he’d been since his sudden reappearance in the night. Stretched out on his side, the position that put the least pressure on his wounds, he looked almost normal.

But far too quiet. He should have rolled over when Santi got into the bed beside him. He should have pressed himself into Santi’s embrace, not remained so very still. Too still.

His arm draped carefully around Chris’s feverishly warm body, Santi watched his lover’s breaths, counted the seconds between them. He thought the monotony of it would lull him to sleep, but each time he started to drift off, a new fear gripped him. Chris's forehead needed to be felt to check his temperature. The locks needed to be checked. The stove needed to be checked to be sure Ishida had turned it off after finishing the soup.

At last, after returning to the bed for the fifth time, so tired he couldn't see straight, Santi shook a sleeping pill from the little bottle out into his hand and swallowed it dry. Curling around Christopher again, he whispered prayers to his God and all of Chris's that they would be safe, and let the drug pull him into unconsciousness.


	4. Simple Comforts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With rest and pain medication, Wolfe can think a little more clearly, and he begins to process the fact that he's home while Santi takes care of him.
> 
> All comfort in this chapter. Wolfe has some intense feelings, but no torture details.

Wolfe lay very still in the warm comfort of his own bed, in his own room, in his own home. It was always best not to move too much, in the days after… After. He wasn’t going to think about that anymore. It was over. He was home.

Somewhere between stumbling into Nic’s arms and waking from drugged and dreamless sleep, he’d come to accept that this was real. He’d almost refused the painkiller Nic offered when he woke, just for fear that it would take away this clarity of thought. It had been so long since he could  _ think _ . But the pain… No. He wasn’t going to think about the pain. It was dulled now, soft around the edges, though not so much as to make movement seem like a good idea.

That was fine. He’d moved more than enough for one day, much more than he would have in… He’d moved enough. He’d taken the pill that Nic offered; he’d endured the humiliating ordeal of being carried to the bathroom; he’d sat upright for the time it took to drink down a mug of soup. Vegetable soup from a High Garda ration can. He knew the taste of the stuff was horrid, but he couldn’t convince his tongue to believe that it was anything short of delicious.

Such a simple creature he’d become, to appreciate over-salted beans and mushy bits of carrot. And the mug. So small a kindness, but he’d nearly cried when Nic put it in his hands. He couldn’t hold it entirely on his own, weak and shaky as he was, but bringing the mug to his lips with Nic’s support was so much better than helplessly waiting for the spoon.

When the soup was done, Nic had laid him down again on his side, the closest thing to a comfortable position that was possible. It felt good just to lie there, perfectly still, and stare at the familiar sight of his own bedroom. Better yet when Nic returned from cleaning up the dishes to sit on the bed beside him, stroking his hair with a gentle hand.

“How are you feeling?”

There was no way to answer that question. Even if he trusted his voice to function, which he didn’t, there was nothing he could say. Nothing that wouldn’t bring him to the cliff’s edge and leave him precariously close to saying  _ everything _ . There were things that Nic could never know, for Wolfe knew too horribly well the price of forbidden knowledge.

Wolfe didn’t want to think about that. He wanted to think about Nic, warm and strong and so beautiful that Wolfe’s heart ached at the sight of him. Niccolo Santi, no longer a dream, no longer a delusion, but real enough to get his fingers stuck in the tangles of Wolfe’s hair. 

Real enough to say, softly, “The medicine isn’t doing enough, is it? I can’t give you more yet. It’s too early; it wouldn’t be safe. But maybe I can take your mind off it. Would you like it if I brushed your hair?”

It was strange, still, to be asked what he would like. Strange even to think about it, but, yes, he would like it. Not that he had any way of saying so. Even the small movement of nodding seemed like too much, and he didn’t think he could bear the shame if he tried without success to speak a simple affirmative. All he could do was look up at Nic hopefully. Pathetic.

Nic must have read the look in Wolfe’s eyes, or simply taken silence for agreement, because he moved around to Wolfe’s other side, grabbing a hairbrush from the dresser on his way. Sitting behind Wolfe, he carefully gathered Wolfe’s long hair. “So many tangles already,” Nic whispered. His calloused fingers swept loose strands from beneath Wolfe’s cheek to fan them out over the pillow. “I’m going to take it slow. I don’t want to hurt you.” 

_ It won’t hurt _ , Wolfe wanted to reassure his lover.  _ You can’t hurt me like this. _ The feeling of Nic’s hands in his hair was the opposite of hurt. Only the softest sensation on his scalp when Nic lifted the first section to brush.

Just as Wolfe himself would have done, Nic started with the very end of the section, holding the hair firm so that there was no pull while he worked out the tangles. Only the quiet sound of the brush. When the ends were done, Nic moved his hand up a short distance and began the process anew. Slow, cautious strokes, stopping at the slightest sign of resistance. Whispered apologies for those tiny pulls.

It was such a simple thing, to have his hair brushed. For so much of Wolfe’s life, it had been a daily necessity, attended to without thought, but after being denied all but the barest requirements of survival for so long, it felt like the most extravagant luxury. He recognized the absurdity of that, even as his muscles, tight with the effort of holding himself so still, relaxed, and he heard himself let out a quiet sigh. 

Nic had spent the better part of the past day caring for his every need. This was nothing compared to all of that.

But that was just it. This was nothing, unnecessary. He could live with filthy, matted hair. He had for so very long. Nic had already done so much. Nic didn’t need to do another thing, but he brushed Wolfe’s hair, for no reason other than the comfort if would give.

Little by little, Nic worked his way up until the bristles of the brush caressed Wolfe’s scalp. That felt good. So good that a soft moan, a sound of genuine pleasure, slipped past his lips.

Before Wolfe could think to be embarrassed at that disproportionate reaction, Nic ran the brush over his head again, saying, “This feels good, does it? I’m glad to hear it.” Another stroke of the brush, another sound of pleasure. "That's it, love, relax. All you have to do is rest and feel better."

Wolfe could do that. He could lie there, still and comfortable, and absorb this feeling. His body sinking into the mattress, his head into the pillow. So soft. Brush bristles on his head, small points of light pressure, slow movement. Hands in his hair, gathering, dividing, holding the next section firm and still. Quiet sounds. Bristles through hair. Nic’s voice, telling him he was safe and loved.

It had been so long since he felt this good. The feeling swelled within him, almost unbearable, and he felt tears welling up in his eyes. Too weak to hold them back, he let them drip down onto the pillow. Gods, he cried so easily now, as if his time in… in that place had opened the floodgates and he could no longer close them.

He had been little more than a beast, there. Huddled and shaking, helpless and screaming, emptied of all but the desperate animal need to survive. At times, emptied even of that. He’d been hollowed out, scraped raw, until there was nothing within but a howling void to be filled with ever more pain.

Stroke by stroke, Nic made him human again. With every gentle touch, every careful stroke, every loving word, a little light trickled into the void. It was so small, and the emptiness so vast, but it soothed the raw edges, made it possible to imagine that someday, far in the future, the void might be filled.

The tears flowed freely, a stream of emotion he could not contain. Such a strange feeling, to be both overflowing and empty, comfortable and aching. Nic wiped the tears and kept brushing. The tangles worked out now, he drew the brush in long strokes from scalp to ends, murmuring reassurances.

“It’s all right. I know it hurts. I am here,  _ amore mio. _ I will take care of you.  It must seem like so much, but it will get better. Broken bones heal twice as strong.”

Nic kept brushing long past the point at which there was any possibility that so much as a single tangle remained. He brushed until Wolfe’s tears ran dry, the supply exhausted. Wiping away the last salty drops, Nic said, “It must be uncomfortable to have all this hair tangling and getting in your face. I’ll braid it for you. When I’m done, I thought we might read for a while. Would you like that?”

_ Read. _ Wolfe’s breath caught. The word seemed to echo, and if Wolfe had so much as a drop left to cry, he would have cried it. He hadn’t read a book since… since… He didn’t know when. It might as well have been an eternity since he saw words on a page.

“I thought you would,” Nic said while he separated Wolfe’s hair into three sections. As careful of pulling as he had been with the brush, Nic crossed one section over the other, then the next, working at a steady pace.

It had always amused Wolfe to think of how good his partner was at braiding. Having never grown his own hair long enough to braid, Nic’s ability lay entirely in the dexterity of his hands and his fondness for putting those hands in Wolfe’s hair. This was by no means his best work; with Wolfe lying on his side, the braid inevitably ended up off-center, the sections uneven. But it was neat and efficient, loose enough at the top to permit easy movement of the head, tight enough the rest of the way down to hold for some time before it would have to be redone.

Draping the end of it over Wolfe’s shoulder, Nic bent to kiss Wolfe’s cheek. “There. Much tidier. Just a moment, love. Let me load a Blank.” His weight shifted away as he reached over to his nightstand. Pages rustled, Nic browsing his Codex for a book to load in the Blank.

His Codex. Wolfe wondered what had happened to his own Codex. Gone, most likely. Another dull ache to add to his collection of pains and grief. He couldn’t bring himself to care all that much.

It was easy enough to let that thought go when Nic settled back into place, lying behind Wolfe with an arm draped carefully around him, avoiding the sore spots, to hold the Blank where they both could see its pages.

The script was so small that Wolfe had to squint to see it without his glasses, but he recognized the text as soon as the page came into focus. Plato’s  _ Symposium _ . A classic work. A dialogue on love. How fitting a choice for their first book to share together since their reunion.

Resting his head on his hand just above Wolfe’s head, Nic began to read aloud. “Concerning the things about which you ask to be informed I believe that I am not ill-prepared with an answer…”

Wolfe followed the words as long as he could, until his eyes lost their focus and the words blurred on the page. He needed his glasses, but there was no way to get them without pain or shame, and he’d had more than enough of those. It was enough, he decided, to have read for a little while, just to know that he still could. It was enough to immerse himself in the sound of ancient words spoken in his lover’s voice, another little piece of the life he’d lost, now restored.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Plato's Symposium can be found here: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html
> 
> It is a philosophical dialogue celebrating gay love, so obviously Wolfe and Santi must like it.


	5. Reading in the Sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shortly after his return home, Santi brings a still-wounded Wolfe outside to read together in the sun. Reposted from Tumblr.
> 
> This chapter is the fluffiest of fluff. No content warnings for this one.

The sun all but blinded him the first time Nic carried him outside. Wolfe had always known that even at their brightest, glows were no match for the sun, but to feel it on such a visceral level was another matter. Squeezing his eyes shut, he turned his head toward Nic’s shoulder while spots danced behind his eyelids.

He could feel the tension in Nic’s arms at that, the intake of breath. Nic grasping, perhaps for the first time, that Wolfe had spent the past year in the dark.

Nic kissed the top of his head. “Give it time. You’ll get used to it.” The quiver in Nic’s voice betrayed his uncertainty. So little was certain anymore.

After a short walk through air that smelled fresh with hints of the nearby sea, Nic set him down on a seat far softer than any he remembered having in their little courtyard. A swift and cautious peek through downcast eyes revealed the familiar pattern of a blanket from their bedroom. Blankets and pillows; Nic had turned their plain wooden bench into a seat worthy of royalty with every spare blanket and pillow in the house.

Thus cushioned, he almost, almost didn’t hurt. The warmth of the sunlight seemed to soak into his aching joints, while the thin silk of his robe protected his healing burns.

Nic sat beside him, one leg up on the bench, and pulled Wolfe back against him to sit almost fully upright, shifting the pillows around them to ensure that every sore spot was cushioned. “There. That will be comfortable, I hope.” There was the faintest hint of a question in his voice, but he didn’t ask anything.

The past few days of silence must have been enough to get the message across that Wolfe was incapable of answering. He had broken himself too badly in those last months of captivity, stubborn refusal to speak turning into genuine inability. All he could offer was a satisfied hum and a nuzzle at Nic’s chest.

That seemed to be enough. Nic kissed his forehead, then leaned over to pick up a book from the ground beside the bench. He settled it on Wolfe’s lap and opened it. “Since your eyes are still adjusting to the light, I guess I’ll read,” he said, turning to the first page. Holding the book with one hand, his other arm wrapped around Wolfe, he began, “Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide…”

The Odyssey. A fitting choice, Wolfe thought with a smile. Snuggling into the man he loved, the man he had somehow, impossibly, come home to, Wolfe basked in the warmth of the sun and the words of the epic, until the red glare through his eyelids did not seem quite so unbearable. Until, slowly, he could open his eyes and take in the words on the page. Until he could look up and see Nic’s eyes, brilliant green in the sunlight.

It hurt, a little, to push himself up high enough to reach Nic’s lips, but the kiss was worth it, so perfect it brought tears to his eyes. And when he could hold himself up no longer and collapsed against his partner’s chest, tearing their lips apart, Nic held him, stroking his hair, and returned to reading.


	6. Simple Triggers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wolfe is starting to feel better, but he finds that even the simplest things can trigger terrible memories.
> 
> This chapter is dark and very heavy on the whump. There is a detailed torture flashback, including both physical and psychological torture beyond what is described in canon. An unnamed minor character is killed, and Qualls tells Wolfe some disturbing lies.

The tray of food was nearly incomprehensible in its scale and variety. Sitting in his bed, propped up against pillows without which he would collapse, Wolfe stared at the meal Nic had presented to him, unsure of where to even begin. Soup, bread, tea, a little piece of cake. Cake, of all things. And an orange.

His eyes lingered on the bright fruit, and the memory came so vivid and clear that the tray and the room and even the man he loved faded from his view until all he could see was that orange sphere.

_It had rolled inexplicably to a stop in front of the bars of his cell, and the chain fastened to his ankle had been just long enough that when he stretched himself out, he could reach through the bars and grab it. He’d gone so long without food that he bit into the thing skin and all, and even the bitter skin tasted like a gift from the gods themselves. He’d been licking the juice and scraps of pulp from his hands when the guards came._

_They knew. Of course they knew. He hadn’t yet had a chance to lick the drips of juice from the floor. They hauled him to the room at the end of the hall, strapped him to an iron frame, and beat him until he vomited up the orange in its entirety, along with every drop of acid his stomach held._

_That would have been bad enough, but then came the sharp sting of the needle and the shifting and warping of his senses. And then Qualls brought the man in. The man he said had rolled that orange down the hall from his cell to Wolfe’s. Tall, muscular, dark hair and tan skin. The man could have been anyone, but in the haze of drugs and starvation and agony, Wolfe saw Niccolo Santi._

_Wolfe would never forgive himself for failing to see the man’s real face._

_The guards brought the man up to Wolfe, and Qualls ordered him to kiss his lover goodbye. The man had kissed him, hesitant at first, then passionate, as if it was his only hope of survival. And Wolfe had kissed back._

_It would have been easier if he had, in that moment, been certain it was Nic. But by that time, he’d heard too many lies, hallucinated Nic at his side too many times, to fully believe it. Still, he’d kissed him._

_He wouldn’t forgive himself for that, either._

_And then the real torture began. They bound the man to the table in the middle of the room and took him apart, piece by piece, injecting drugs and cauterizing wounds to keep him alive and screaming far past the point at which he should have been claimed by merciful unconsciousness and death._

_Wolfe could not look away. They beat him when he tried, held his head in position and his eyes open when that was no longer enough. He watched the stranger who looked like his beloved die, and he couldn’t even remember the poor man’s face._

_When it was over, they’d thrown him back in his cell, chained at the wrists and ankles with chains too short to reach the cell door. Days, or at least what seemed like days, passed. And then Qualls had come, carrying a bowl of flavorless stew that Wolfe devoured with animal desperation, all but mindless in his starvation._

_Wolfe wished he could be sure that Qualls lied when he said the meat in it came from that poor, murdered man. He wished he could remember whether there had been any meat in it at all._

He’d been too weak to even cry then, but he cried now with heavy sobs that shook his whole body as Nic held him, stroking his hair and speaking reassuringly. He clung to Nic while the horror and grief tore their way through him, leaving him shattered and shaking by the time the tears stopped. It hurt to cry so hard with his body still weak and wounded. He deserved nothing less.

Nic looked at him with confused eyes. Even if he had figured out how to speak again, Wolfe wouldn’t have known what to say, how to explain, so he just buried his face in his lover’s chest, overcome with gratitude and guilt.


	7. Panic Attack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shortly after returning home, Wolfe has his first panic attack.
> 
> No specific warnings for this chapter. See the tags.

The sound of shuffling beyond the curtained window startled Wolfe from his reading. It stopped. His ears strained to pick the sound up again, but it was gone.

It had sounded like it was right at the window.

They were coming for him.

The shakes came so hard and so suddenly that he dropped the Blank he had been holding. The loud thump when it hit the floor set his heart racing. He had to run, but he could barely walk. He had to hide. But they would tear apart the house to find him, and then....

Nic was home. Nic was always home now. In the kitchen, making curry that smelled like a dream.

They would take Nic, too. The thought took his breath away. He had to warn Nic.

He dragged in a too-shallow breath and grasped the arms of the chair to haul himself to his feet. The blanket he’d been wrapped in tangled around his legs, slowing him down. It took too long to get it off with clumsy, splinted fingers that couldn't properly grab the thin fabric. He was panting, struggling to breathe by the time he got himself upright, clenching his jaw against the pain of putting his weight on feet not yet healed.

He had to stay silent. If they heard him, they would know he was there. They would burst through the door and…

The sharp pain in his chest took him by surprise. Not the burns or the muscle cramps he knew so well, but a new pain, deep within him.

His heart. His heart was failing.

He was dying.

And that might not have been such a terrible thought, if not for the fact that if he died, he couldn’t warn Nic.

It wasn’t until he’d stumbled into the kitchen and thrown his arms around his partner that he realized how useless his continued survival was. Even with danger lurking outside the door, the words wouldn’t come.

He clung to Nic, tears streaming down his face from the pain, gasping for breaths against what felt like a heavy weight on his chest, and his lips wouldn’t even move. The only sound he could make was a choked sob.

Nic turned. Said something Wolfe couldn't make out. Wrapped arms around him that did nothing to soothe the fear or the pain. Kept talking, a meaningless flow of words that only heightened Wolfe's fear. They would hear Nic if he kept talking.

They would take him. Take him and chain him in a cell and force him down that hall and strap him down and cut him and beat him and burn him and make him scream. It took so much to make Nic scream, and Wolfe could all but see it before his eyes.

Breathing was getting harder and harder. His legs wouldn't hold his weight. The pain in his chest might as well have been a sword, heated to near-molten temperature and plunged into his chest.

He was going to die. At least he would die in Nic's arms.

No. Then they would take Nic. He had to save Nic.

Desperate, he pushed himself back from the man he loved, dragged a hand free to point with frantic jabs toward the door while his other hand tugged at Nic's arm.

He thought of a million things to say, but his lips wouldn't move. Air barely passed through his throat. Usually, when Nic was in danger, when Qualls threatened to hurt Nic if Wolfe didn't speak, he could at least manage a few words. A plea for Nic's life. A protestation of Nic's innocence.

But he had lost even that tiny scrap of his voice. A fresh stab of pain in his chest made him double over, and he might have fallen had Nic not been there to catch him and hold him, speaking in a soothing voice that made no sense with danger right outside the door.

Nic scooped him up. Carried him to the bedroom, speaking gently all the while. Set him down on the bed and picked up the Codex from the nightstand. Opened it and wrote in quick, aggressive strokes of the pen.

Wolfe broke down in helpless, breathless sobs. Nic didn't know. Didn't understand. They were watching the Codex. They would know. They would come and take them both.

He managed a wordless cry, frustration and terror and agony. 

Nic put the Codex down and climbed into the bed beside Wolfe to hold him, gently stroking his hair the way he had done every time Wolfe became upset since the night of his release.

“Breathe. Chris. Breathe.” That wasn't the gentle tone he had been using these past few days - was it days? It seemed like days - since their reunion. It was the tone he used with newly recruited soldiers, strict and commanding.

Wolfe obeyed. Of course he obeyed. There was no choice when Nic spoke that way. Somehow, even through the crushing weight and stabbing pain in his chest, he could get air into his lungs when Nic ordered it.

For an interminable interval, all he could do was breathe as Nic ordered. Breathe and pray to every god whose name he had ever heard that Nic would be safe.

He could die if he knew Nic would be safe.

The knock at the door brought fresh stabs of terror and pain. They had come. It was too late. He and Nic were both going to die. Wolfe knew his failing heart wouldn't hold out once the torture began, if it even lasted that long, but Nic? Nic would live in agony for as long as Qualls wanted. And that could be a very long time.

Nic kissed Wolfe's forehead and got up, too fast for Wolfe to grab. Fighting the pain, struggling to breathe, Wolfe dragged himself after his beloved.

He got as far as the middle of the bedroom floor.

He heard the front door open. Nic talking to a soft-voiced woman.

Wolfe knew that voice. Ishida. The Medica attached to Nic's company. Small, with quick hands and a quicker mind. One of the few native speakers he could practice Japanese with, back when he could speak. She had come to see him two? three? times since his release.

They'd take her, too. Didn't she see them lurking out in the street? No, neither she nor Nic would think anything of a few extra soldiers in the street.

He heard the door lock after Ishida came through. At least Nic remembered that. Wolfe could make out what they were saying as they came closer.

“... clutching his chest and trouble breathing?”

“Yes, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better.” That was Nic. Dear, sweet Nic, so worried about Wolfe's health he didn't see the threat to himself. Wolfe looked up to see his partner coming through the door, saw the look of panic on his face, briefly thought Nic might understand. But no, Nic was running toward him, crying out in Italian, “My God, Christopher, what are you doing?”

_ Trying to save you, my beloved fool. Trying and failing to save you. _ The words, of course, caught in his throat.

Nic lifted him and carried him back to the bed, held him there and ordered him to breathe while Ishida took out her equipment and made her examinations.

Wolfe wondered if she would be able to tell how much longer his heart would hold out. Would he die here in Nic's arms or strapped down and screaming? Considering his luck, he expected it would be the latter.

The Medica’s next words caught him by surprise. “I don’t think anything is wrong with him, physically. Not anything new, at least. It isn't his heart.”

“Is it a memory, then?” Nic asked, sounding at once hopeful and worried.

“It could be. That or a panic attack. The symptoms match with panic.” She took both of Wolfe's hands in hers and leaned forward to look into his eyes. “Did something frighten you, Scholar?”

He couldn't answer. His head wouldn't even move to nod.

“He looked afraid when he came to me,” Nic offered. “I thought it was the pain in his chest that scared him.”

Ishida nodded and looked back at Wolfe. “Listen to me, Scholar Wolfe. You are feeling the things you are feeling because of fear. It must feel terrible, but it will pass.” She looked over at Nic and repeated, more firmly. “It will pass. Stay with him until it does. I trust you can determine what sort of comfort is helpful to him. Give him space if he needs it. I will send a list of recommended readings to your Codex.”

“Thank you, Haruko,” Nic said, “I'm sorry to disturb your dinner. I just thought-”

“Captain, please, it isn't any trouble. Claire will keep my plate warm for me.” She stood and gathered her things. “Come and lock up behind me. He'll feel better if he knows you've secured the house.”

“Right. Of course.”

Wolfe listened to their footsteps, considering this new information. Ishida was good at her work. She wouldn't overlook a problem as large as a heart attack. But for fear alone to cause such pain… 

He wondered if everything he had felt in the prison was even real. If the sound he’d heard that set all this off was even real. His heart was still pounding as if the danger was real. His whole body trembled with certainty that they were coming for him no matter what the Medica said.

Nic slammed the door and turned the lock with a loud clunk. He all but sprinted back to the bed, where he sat beside Wolfe and wrapped him in a careful embrace.

“I'm here, love. I'm here, and I will protect you. Just keep breathing for me. Listen to me and breathe.”

Wolfe wrapped his arms around the man he loved and obeyed the steady rhythm of his orders to breathe until his heart calmed and the fear and the pain receded. When his breaths came evenly and his hands were still, he looked up at Nic, searching for a way to explain that he had been a delusional fool, that he was sorry for everything, especially this. He got a hand up to stroke Nic's cheek, furry from days without shaving.

“Better?” Nic asked, mirroring the gesture, his fingers tangling in Wolfe's overgrown beard.

With what felt like considerable effort, Wolfe nodded. His whole body seemed weak, exhausted as it had ever been after charging across battlefields. The hand on Nic's cheek trembled, then fell as his arm gave out.

Nic lowered him down onto the pillows and kissed his forehead. “Rest, my dear. I will be here to watch over you.”

He hadn't planned to fall asleep, but he did.


	8. Comfort and Memories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Qualls played mind games with Wolfe in Rome, and the memories of it won't let Wolfe have any peace, haunting him when he tries to relax and coming to him as vivid dreams when he sleeps.  
There is a detailed Rome flashback in this chapter, including both physical and psychological abuse.

EPHEMERA

**A letter from Scholar Christopher Wolfe to Captain Niccolo Santi**

**Destroyed by the Master of Cells in Rome**

_ Nic, _

_ By the time you read this, I will be dead. I had a more eloquent way of saying that, in the letter I filed to be sent to you on this occasion. Perhaps you will read that one, and you can admire my skill with words there. Perhaps it has already been destroyed along with all my other writings, and this is the only ghost of mine that will haunt you. I have asked, but they will not tell me. _

_ But there is no time to dwell on that. You have, I think, returned from Belgium by now, and you will want to know what happened to me. I do not think I can answer that to your satisfaction, but I will try. You will be disappointed in me, my love. Forgive me. I made a grave error, and I fell into heretical ways. I was caught, and now I am to be executed. I am eating my last meal as I write this letter. It must be breakfast, because they have served me pastries and tea. _

_ Please, my dear Nic, do not go searching for more answers than that. You will not find any. My crime was so great that the details of my case will be highly restricted. Even my mother will not be able to grant you access, so do not trouble her. Nor should you expect any sympathy from the Artifex or the Archivist. They know of my crime, and they have rightly condemned me for it. Do not go seeking revenge, as the fault was solely my own. I deserve any insult you hear spoken against me, and I will be disappointed if you go and get yourself killed dueling in defense of my honor or any such nonsense. _

_ The only thing you can do for me now is live. Live a long and happy life, for I will be demanding stories from you when next I see you. I will be waiting for you at the gates of the afterlife, whether it proves to be mine, or yours, or something else entirely. Make it a long wait, my love. Come to me old and wrinkled and tell me of all your glorious victories on the battlefield, and of the books you have read, and places you have seen, and people you have known. Tell me of the love that you found in my absence, for even though I have been a jealous bastard in life, I do not want you lonely now. _

_ You will grieve me, and I cannot deny you that, but for my sake, do not linger too long in that grief. I do not deserve it. As I have said, I am guilty of the crime with which I have been charged. I have made my peace with the gods; I am ready to die. You would not thank me for lying to you now, so I will tell you in all honesty that my punishment has been harsh, and I am in such pain that death will come as a relief. Indeed, it is a kindness, and I am grateful for it. _

_ But that is enough of morbid things. In the end, all that matters is that we loved each other. True love is such a contrived notion, but know that you were mine. I had prettier words for you, in my letter on file, but they fail me now. I know I have often been difficult to love, and I am sorry for that. You were everything to me, and I only wish that I did not have to leave you like this. Forgive me, beloved, please. _

_ My time runs short. My cup is dry and my plate empty. Soon, they will come for me, and I will reach my end. I wish that I could see you one last time, but I will have to content myself with my memories of you, which have brought me great comfort in these dark days. When the time comes, I will close my eyes, and I will see your face again, and feel your arms around me, and taste your lips on mine, and I will be with you in my last moments in this world. I hope that you can take some comfort in that. _

_ Christopher Wolfe _

* * *

It had been a good day, as such things went. Nic had to work, but Wolfe’s mind was staying focused better now, and he’d worked out how to hold a book with his splinted fingers, so he’d passed the time engrossed in a newly published history of the Mayan Empire. When Nic came home, he brought fish fresh from the market by the docks for dinner, and they’d eaten in the courtyard, then played a game of _ sennet _before Nic retreated in defeat to the kitchen to clean up. It felt good to win again.

While Nic worked in the kitchen, Wolfe sat on the couch with the book opened again and a blanket around his shoulders. He didn’t need the blanket, not really, but the weight of it felt good. Secure.

He found his place in the book and resumed reading, but it was harder to focus than it had been earlier. Something he couldn’t put a finger on nagged at his nerves, making his eyes twitch away from the page at every clatter from the kitchen. The book shook in his hands. He tugged the blanket tighter around himself. Sometimes, it helped to be warm.

Not this time, though. If anything, the blanket made it worse. It was too comfortable. That was the problem. He was warm, his stomach was full, and nothing hurt, and that was wrong. Being this comfortable just meant the coming pain would be truly awful.

That was an irrational thought. No pain was coming. Only Nic, with a cup of tea. Chai, heavily spiced, with enough cream to turn the color dusty brown. Leaving the book open in his lap, Wolfe reached out with both hands to take the cup, finding it warm, but not too hot. Ready to drink. He smiled his thanks, and brought the cup to his lips.

The first sip froze him. The spices had masked the scent of it, but he knew the taste. Strong black Assam formed the base of the blend.

The tea from the prison.

Nausea struck so hard he almost lost control. _ No_. He _wasn’t_ going to lose control. He wasn’t going to let the day turn bad now. He kept his hands still as he handed the cup back to Nic, who looked down at him with a mix of confusion and concern.

He held up a hand and clumsily formed the letters to spell out, “Mint.” That got Nic moving back to the kitchen; he knew how the nausea could strike without warning, and the urgency of treating it. Wolfe looked back down at his book, trying to make his eyes focus while he breathed through the nausea. The flavor of the tea lingered, and he bit his lip until the metallic taste of blood washed it away.

The pain helped, too. There. That was it. If being too comfortable made him uneasy, it was a simple enough matter to make himself less comfortable. Shrugging off the blanket, he stood with the book clutched between his still-healing hands and moved to the corner of the room. Yes. That was better. He sank to the floor next to a bookshelf and sat with the edge of it pressing into his back and his legs bent at the knee to form a crude resting place for the book.

Sitting like this would make him sore, and he might pay for this moment’s peace with tomorrow’s aches, but it was easier to breathe here with the hard floorboards beneath him. This was comfortable enough; indeed, it was luxury compared to the prison, and it set his mind at ease. The nausea was all but gone by the time Nic came back with a fresh cup of tea, this one smelling of mint and sugar.

He drank it slowly, waiting for Nic to say something about his new seating arrangements, but Nic only knelt beside him and rested a hand on his knee.

“If something hurts, I’ll help,” Nic said when Wolfe handed the empty cup back to him.

Wolfe shook his head and looked back at the book.

“I’m going to go to bed. Are you coming?” Nic asked, standing and holding out a hand to Wolfe.

Wolfe squinted at the book. The words blurred, and he pulled off his glasses, fumbled with them until he had them folded to put away in his robe pocket. Might as well give up and sleep. He didn’t miss the relief on Nic’s face when he reached up to take his partner’s hand.

He slept without blankets or pillows, and that kept the unease at bay until he drifted into slumber. There, the memories lay in wait for him, vivid and painful and real.

* * *

_The first time Qualls had him brought to the comfortable room, it really was only to talk over tea, and that had been cruel enough. Wolfe had been certain his mother had intervened to protect him from further abuse, and he had been so horribly grateful for it. He’d soaked his aching body in the bath, washed away blood and grime, and dressed in soft new clothes that did not chafe so much against his abraded skin. He’d brushed his hair for the first time in weeks, and he’d sat in the padded chair and filled his empty stomach with tea and sweets, expecting all the while that this would be the norm for the remainder of his imprisonment. He answered the questions Qualls put to him honestly, for he saw no need to lie, and when Qualls left, he had gone to sleep beneath warm blankets in the bed in the corner, confident enough in his newfound safety to sleep deeply._

_ It had been a betrayal as shattering as Theo’s - _ the Archivist’s_; the man was no longer worthy of being called by that familiar name - condemnation of his press when the guards came in the dead of night to drag him down the hall to the much sharper bed that awaited him there. _

_ But he’d learned the lesson of it well enough. There was no safety. No kindness. Only pain. _

_ The second time, he had been far weaker, though not so weak as to trust in false comfort. But there had been no need. Qualls sat at table already, drinking his cup of tea, when the guards dragged Wolfe in and dropped him into the chair across from the torturer. _

_ He sat, but only barely. All the cushions in the world couldn’t have made it comfortable for his broken body to sit upright. He’d been starved long enough that he snatched up a pastry without waiting for an invitation to eat, and he devoured it while Qualls set down his teacup to address him. _

_ “Scholar Wolfe. I will have no questions for you today. I have determined that we have learned all that there is to learn from you. You will soon be executed for your heresy.” He gestured to the table, where a pen and paper sat beside the tray of refreshments. “Before your execution, you may write to your Captain Santi, if you wish. Provided you refrain from including any of your heresy, I will see that your message is delivered.” He stood, and started toward the door. “Enjoy the meal, Scholar Wolfe. It will be your last.” _

_ With that, Qualls left, taking the guards with him. _

_ It was no easy task to hold a pen so soon after having his nails torn out, but he refused to be dissuaded by pain. This was his final chance to write to Nic, and he would not squander it. Qualls might have been lying. About the letter, about the execution, any of it. But both the risk and the reward were too great. _

_ Wolfe wrote. His hand ached and trembled, and his eyes blurred with tears, but he wrote. The weight of the task all but crushed him. This would be his final legacy. Probably his only legacy. Qualls refused to tell him whether his personal letters would be destroyed along with his books and journals, but he had to assume that they would be. Most had been sent through the Codex, so it was within the Archivist’s power to erase them. Nic, perhaps, might secret away a few paper notes, but beyond that, there would be nothing left of him. _

_ His final act would be to give Nic his love and, if Nic could read the warning between the lines and know from it the enemies that he faced, to save his partner's life. With his work erased, it would be Wolfe’s only accomplishment in life. He found that easier to accept now than he would have before the bars closed around him. _

_ That life had never seemed so far away as it did when he sat with pen in hand, trying to make his pain-addled brain form words adequate to the task of expressing what he felt for Nic. The paragraphs already written looked so clumsy that he would have torn the page to shreds, if he thought he had the time to do it over. _

_ But there were boots in the hall, and a key in the door, and all he could do was sign his name. His full name; this might be the only record of it. _

_ Qualls was not there when the door opened, only the two guards, the first with irons ready for Wolfe’s wrists. No purpose in those but the cruelty of them, not when he was so weak he could barely make it to his feet to meet them. _

_ He wanted to meet his death standing. _

_ He stumbled before they were even through the door, and they dragged him the rest of the way down the hall. _

_ Qualls waited for him there, along with two more guards with guns in hand. So it was to be by firing squad, then. There was some relief in knowing that. It would be quick, at least. _

_ Silently, he said what prayers he could while they chained him to an iron frame in front of a wall dented with bullet holes. To his own gods first, not that he expected much good to come of that; his was not a faith of salvation for the undeserving. Osiris would judge him by how he had lived, and it was far too late to change how the scales would balance. Salvation was the provenance of Nic’s God, and he prayed to that one, too, for Nic. _

_ When he was bound, the guards went to join their fellows, drawing their own weapons. One by one, the guns pointed straight at his head. _

_ “Scholar Wolfe, do you recant your heresy?” Qualls asked. One of his favorite questions to begin with. _

_ Wolfe didn’t answer. The answer never mattered. He kept his chin up and looked straight at the four guns. They’d all heard him scream, and cry, and beg, but if they were hoping for any more, he wouldn’t give it to them. _

_ Shaking his head, Qualls took out his Codex. “A pity it has come to this. Would you have a final reading, Scholar Wolfe?” _

_ He almost didn’t speak. There was pride in going silently to the grave. But the words came, rusty and unbidden. “Can you access anything by Captain Niccolo Santi?” Nic had published little enough, but there were a few things. Papers on strategy. _

_ The pages of the Codex turned. “Do you have a preference?” _

_ He shook his head. He wanted Nic. Any scrap of Nic he could get would do. _

_ More pages turned, and Qualls cleared his throat. “On Burner Tactical Errors in the Paris Uprising of 2027.” _

_ Nic’s most recent publication. The words sounded wrong, defiled by the torturer’s voice, but Wolfe fought the urge to ask the man to stop reading. He closed his eyes, and he called up the memory. Nic, sitting at his desk, reading his draft out loud. Wolfe could hear his lover’s voice, overlaying that of his tormentor, deep and strong with just a hint of an Italian accent. He heard his own voice, too, interrupting with corrections, occasionally with praise. He’d done too much of the former and not enough of the latter. _

I’m sorry, dear Nic.

_ From the memory, he summoned the illusion of his beloved, recreated Nic in his mind until he could feel his lover’s strong arms around him, and Nic's voice whispering in his ear. _

Don’t be afraid, Christopher. I am here.

_ He was afraid, more than he would have imagined, but the fear ebbed as the illusion of Nic grew stronger. Lips brushed his neck. Had his arms been free, he would have wrapped them around his hallucination and lost himself in it. As it was, he could still just hear Qualls, reading the last words of the paper’s introduction. _

_ The safety switches of the guns clicked off. Boots shuffled. With a deafening crack, the first bullet flew by his ear. Time seemed to slow. If they were following procedure, they would all fire at once, but it felt like minutes later when the second bullet grazed his shoulder. Qualls toying with him, or his own mind? _

_ A third bullet flew by, and he had to swallow the frantic pleas that burned at the tip of his tongue. He didn’t want to die. Gods help him, he didn’t want to die. _

_ The fourth bullet, too, missed, and relief flooded through him. This was merely another of Qualls’s games. A feint, intended to draw him out. He opened his eyes. _

_ Qualls stood directly in front of him, a gun in his black-gloved hand, the barrel so close Wolfe’s eyes crossed when he tried to focus on it. “This is your last chance, Scholar Wolfe. Will you cooperate? Or will you die?” _

_ The torturer’s finger tightened on the trigger. Wolfe could hardly breathe. _

_ A sob wrenched free of him, and with it came words, ragged and painful in his throat. “What do you want from me?” He kept his chin up, and his eyes on the gun, but it took such effort that his whole body trembled, the motion of it painful against the chains that held him. _

_ The gun lowered. The safety clicked on, and Qualls holstered it before taking another step toward Wolfe, bringing him so close that Wolfe could smell the tea on his breath. Strong black Assam. Nausea rolled over Wolfe as he realized he could still taste the same tea in his own mouth. _

_ Qualls laid a gentle hand on Wolfe’s cheek, his thumb wiping a tear that leaked from Wolfe’s eye. “There now, Scholar Wolfe. I think we have made progress today.” _

* * *

Wolfe recoiled from the touch, flinging himself back only to find that it was not cold iron that held him, but warm, powerful arms, wrapped around him from behind. _ Nic_.

And there was Nic’s voice, soft and gentle and close to his ear. “Christopher. It’s a dream. It isn’t real. You are home. You are safe. I am here.” Nic spoke Italian, and the sound of it loosened the knot of panic left behind in the memory’s wake.

He must have been flailing again. Nic’s grip was firm, holding Wolfe tight against his chest. A comfortable position. Secure. He let himself relax, and felt the breath Nic let out against his shoulder.

“With me now?” Nic asked, reaching for Wolfe’s hand.

Wolfe clasped Nic’s hand in his, clutching it to his chest. It was warm and solid enough that he mostly believed in it. He held his other hand up to sign an affirmative, but his fingers refused to form themselves into the sign. The prison was too close in his mind to allow even that limited form of speech. He could still see the walls, the bars. He could still feel the pain.

Nic squeezed his hand. “Open your eyes, Chris. See for yourself. We are here at home.”

A deep breath for courage, and Wolfe let his eyes flicker open. Bright light. Nic must already have turned the glows up. He looked straight ahead, blinking back the blur of sleep as much as he could. The image was still fuzzy around the edges, but it was as good as it would get without his glasses. There were Nic’s sketches framed on the wall, and his Codex and alarm clock on the nightstand. And there, when he looked down, was Nic’s hand, the long fingers wrapped around his own. Wolfe exhaled.

“Yes. That’s it. You’re back. Does anything hurt? Squeeze my hand for yes.”

The aches lingered in Wolfe’s scars, but he didn’t move, didn’t squeeze his lover’s hand. The pain wasn’t real.

They lay in silence, Nic stroking Wolfe’s hand, very gently, careful of the still-healing fingers. Such a simple touch, but it calmed the doubts that nagged at Wolfe. This was real.

“Can you roll over?” Nic asked after a while. “Let me see you?”

Movement. There was the next step back into reality. He wouldn’t get any more ready by waiting, so he rolled over to take in the sight of Nic’s face. Gorgeous, as it always was. He brought his hands up between them to rest on Nic’s bare chest, spreading his fingers out as much as his splints would allow. He could feel Nic’s heartbeat, and such a reassuring sound that was.

Nic rubbed Wolfe’s back in firm, slow circles, working his way from shoulders to waist and up again. “Something’s been troubling you,” he said, his eyes on Wolfe’s.

Wolfe nodded. No sense in denying it. Nic could read him too well for that, as if the flailing nightmare hadn’t made it obvious. Nothing to be accomplished in admitting it, either, given that he couldn’t speak to say what it was, but that was Nic’s problem.

It took Nic a moment to think through that. He regarded Wolfe with his forehead wrinkled in thought, eyes searching Wolfe’s face for clues. “You can’t get comfortable. But you tell me nothing hurts. Some other sort of irritation? Itching? Or is it the memories?”

Halfway there, but wrong. Wolfe shook his head. This would be less frustrating if he could explain.

But he could. He rolled onto his back, reaching for the Codex on the nightstand. Not very successfully, with his clumsy, broken hand, but Nic was there with him, lifting the book and setting it down between them on the bed. Wolfe opened it to the index, glad that the text he wanted was part of the core collection and thus readily accessible. He wasn’t sure his hands were up to the task of entering a more complex search. No need for a Blank to load the text; Nic would know the reference when he saw the entry in the Codex.

Nic’s finger followed Wolfe’s on the page. “Virgil. The Aeneid, Book II.” He paused, then nodded. “The Trojan Horse. An ambush hidden in a gift.” His eyes met Wolfe’s, and he reached out to stroke Wolfe’s hair. His voice was slow and heavy as he continued, “That was what they did to you. They gave you... what, books? Tea? Blankets? Some small comforts?”

Nic had it now: there had been all of those things, and more. A tremor ran through Wolfe, and he clutched his hands against his chest, a reflexive gesture that had never done a thing to protect him. Merely thinking of it brought the memories painfully close to the surface. Just slightly, he nodded.

“And then they hurt you. They used those things to hurt you.”

He nodded again, squeezing his eyes shut against the tears that welled up in them. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The memories pressed in on him until he wasn’t sure he could keep breathing.

Long fingers ran through his hair. Stroking, stroking, a steady rhythm Wolfe could latch onto. Nic’s voice, too, was an anchor. “And now you can’t trust anything. Oh, Chris.” His lips pressed, softly, to Wolfe’s forehead. “You _ are _ hurting. Maybe not here…” he let his hand trail across Wolfe’s scarred back and around to rest on his abdomen, above the horrible marks there. Before Wolfe could cringe away, the hand lifted, and Nic laid it over Wolfe’s heart. “...but _here_.”

Even with his eyes shut, Wolfe could feel his lover’s gaze, looking not at him, but into him, as if Nic could see the churning abyss of fear and pain and memory at his core. He wanted to curl in on himself and hide. He wanted to open himself wide and let Nic’s light and warmth flood in.

His trembling hands reached for Nic’s, pressed it against his chest. The rest of him shook too hard to move.

Keeping his hand over Wolfe's heart, Nic shifted in the bed. He must have gotten the Codex out of the way, because a moment later, he was pulling Wolfe close with a strong arm around his back. “You don’t have to hold all this in. Even if you can’t talk, you can let it out.” He kissed Wolfe’s cheek, lips brushing a tear that had overflowed. “There’s no shame in crying when you’re in pain, Chris.”

He’d said something like that to Nic, once, after a terrible battle. Years ago now. Strange, to hear his own words reflected back at him. The sound of them crumbled the last of his control.

The sobs came as waves, crashing through him in a relentless onslaught of agony and grief that might have drowned him if not for the security of Nic’s embrace. His tears flowed freely, and he screamed against Nic’s chest as the waves scoured him raw, leaving him shattered and gasping in their wake.

But, somehow, relieved. The pressure within him was not so great once the tide had rolled out. He felt empty, but clean. The world around him seemed more solid and real than it had in some time.

Nic relaxed his grip as Wolfe's tremors died down and his sobs calmed to sniffles, sliding a hand up to stroke Wolfe’s hair again. His other hand remained over Wolfe’s heart, still covered by both of Wolfe’s hands. He kissed Wolfe’s tear-streaked cheeks. “Better now, isn’t it?”

Wolfe nodded, just a fractional dip of his head, and he opened his eyes to see Nic’s smile. A small one, but it was real, and the warmth of it filled a little bit of the hollowness within.

Nic’s expression turned serious, sincere. “You don’t have to face this alone, my love. Let me know when it hurts, even if the hurt is inside you. I’ll be with you. When you think you can’t endure, I will help. Believe in me, if you can’t believe in yourself.” He tucked a loose strand of hair back behind Wolfe’s ear.

If there had been tears left in him, Wolfe might have cried again, from relief, from love. His uninjured fingers curled tight around Nic’s hand. Their lips were already close, and he closed that small distance to kiss the man he loved. A clumsy mess of a kiss, but heartfelt.

When their lips parted, Nic was smiling again. “I love you. Always.”

Wolfe couldn’t form the words to reply in kind, but the look in Nic’s eyes told him there was no need. Nic knew. Somehow, Nic understood. He let himself relax, his head sinking into the pillow while Nic’s fingers combed through his hair, and he gazed into the warm depth of Nic’s eyes until his own eyelids grew heavy, and sleep found him again.

For once, his dreams were peaceful.


	9. The Artifex Visits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Artifex comes to gloat and taunt Wolfe while he recovers. To get the Artifex off their backs, Wolfe and Santi conspire to make it seem like Wolfe is doing worse than he really is.

Christopher set his bishop in place and looked up, the smug grin on his face as good as any boast he might have made. He had every right to it. The black pieces had Santi’s king hopelessly trapped, with no available moves that would turn the game around.

No choice but to surrender. Santi bowed and tipped his king, then set to work resetting the board while Chris sat back in his chair. He was looking better as of late. The color was returning to his face and he filled out his clothes better every day, though they still hung looser than they should have. With the splints off of his right hand, he had an easier time playing chess, and he focused better on the game now. He looked utterly content as he savored this latest victory. A look Santi was grateful beyond words to see.

A look that shattered at the knock on the door.

They weren’t expecting anyone. No deliveries were due, no visitors planned, and Santi had clearly impressed on his friends the importance of writing before coming to his door. Chris didn’t tolerate unexpected guests well.

He sat frozen in his chair, eyes wide and alert, a mouse before a cobra. Santi got to his feet, and was halfway around the table to Chris when the knock pounded again, followed by a voice.

“Open up. I know you’re in there, Wolfe.” 

Santi’s stomach sank. He knew that voice. The Artifex Magnus. It had been months since he’d last spoken with the man, but Santi couldn’t forget the voice that had ordered him to stop looking for Christopher. 

“He’s sleeping,” Santi called out, the first thing that came to mind. More quietly, he continued toward Chris, reaching slowly out to take his partner’s hands. “And I’m not dressed, so you’ll have to give me a moment, sir.”

The Artifex grumbled something about soldiers and their habits, barely audible through the door and almost certainly impolite. 

Ignoring the complaints, Santi helped Chris to his feet. His wits recovered, Chris stood, eyes fixed on the door and hands trembling. Though he shook with tension, Chris’s steps were light, inaudible over Santi’s intentionally heavy footfalls.

“I’ll try to get rid of him,” Santi whispered, helping Chris to sit on the bed. “Give you time to compose yourself, at least, if he won’t go away.” He untucked his shirt and undid two buttons to make it look as if it had been thrown on in a hurry.

Chris raked his hands through his hair in what Santi was sure was a gesture of distress until Chris looked up at him and winked, the same devious look in his eyes that he’d had while they played chess. “Strategic retreat. Feint,” he signed, using the High Garda’s code for battlefield commands.

The plan came together in Santi’s mind in an instant, not so different from deceptions they’d pulled off in war zones under enemy fire. Make the Artifex think Chris was weaker than he really was, so the Artifex would think he’d succeeded in breaking Chris. An enemy who thought he’d already won wouldn’t continue to press the attack.

“Got it,” Santi whispered, planting a quick kiss on his partner’s forehead. “I’ll tell him all about how terribly you’re doing.” He winked and watched Chris grin in response. A fragile grin, but he couldn’t expect better.

Leaving Chris tucked into the bed, disheveled and feigning sleep, Santi went to the door and opened it, letting his shoulders slump and all the worry for Chris that he usually kept bottled up show on his face. “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked, standing aside to allow the old man to enter.

The Artifex had brought two of his personal guards, Santi noticed as he shut the door. At least he had the decency to leave them outside, standing beside the shining steam carriage he’d arrived in.

“I thought I might pay a visit to my colleague and see how he is recovering from his… tragic ordeal,” the Artifex said, looking around the room with his nose wrinkled in distaste. Not up to the standards of his mansion, Santi supposed. 

To be fair, the house wasn’t as tidy as they usually kept it, but Chris had been doing well these past few days, and if Santi favored reading and playing chess with him over sweeping the floors and taking coffee cups to the kitchen, what of it? There would be time enough to sweep when Chris wanted to be left alone.

“I would prefer not to disturb his sleep,” Santi said. His tone stayed light and pleasant, and he pulled a chair out for the Artifex as any polite host might do, locking his rage tight in the vault of his heart. “Can I bring you a drink? Coffee?”

The Artifex eyed the chair dubiously, but he sat. “That won’t be necessary. Tell me, how is Christopher?”

Such casual use of Christopher’s name rankled, but Santi didn’t let that show. He did let out the full weight of his grief, though, as he sank into his own chair and said, “He is profoundly unwell. As I am certain you already know.”

“Do I?” The old man’s ice-blue eyes narrowed.

“You and I are alone here,” Santi said. “I see no reason to maintain any pretense of ignorance, considering the circumstances of our last meeting.”

“Ah, yes. That was, I hope, an enlightening experience for you, Captain.” The Artifex picked up one of the chess pieces they’d left on the table. The black queen. He turned it over in his hand, as if inspecting it. “I suppose I need not expound on the consequences of indiscretion on your part. Very well, then. Has he told you why he was arrested?”

Santi buried his face in his hands. Only half an act. The pain in his voice was real enough as he said, “He hasn’t spoken a word since he came home.”

The Artifex said nothing, but Santi could feel the scrutiny of his gaze. Some, perhaps, might have buckled under that pressure, but Santi had deceived better men than this old tyrant. He always had worked well under pressure.

“He can’t even  _ write _ ,” Santi said, looking up with wet eyes. “He can’t keep a journal. They broke his fingers. Did you know they broke his fingers?” He thought of Chris’s hands, the way they’d looked that first night, the splints still in place on the worst two fingers. The nails just starting to grow back in and the pain he couldn’t massage away no matter how he tried. That was enough to shake a tear loose.

“Pull yourself together, Captain,” the Artifex snapped. “You, of all people, should know desperate measures are sometimes necessary to protect our beloved Library.”

“Is that what you had him tortured to protect?”

The Artifex set the queen back in its place on the board. “Such crude language, but I suppose I should expect no better from a soldier. A cancer of the mind had taken root in him, Captain, and it had to be cut out lest it spread. The methods used in his reeducation were, I assure you, necessary.”

“Necessary,” Santi repeated. As bald a lie as he’d ever heard. Necessary to protect some secret of the Artifex’s, perhaps, or necessary to manipulate the Obscurist Magnus. But best not to state his suspicions outright. Let the Artifex think he knew less than he did.

“But enough of this,” the Artifex said. “Let me see him. It’s well past noon; surely he’s had enough sleep. Get him up.”

Had Chris truly been asleep, Santi would have needed a direct order from his own commander to wake him. But Chris wasn’t really asleep, so Santi said only, “He sleeps badly at night.”

“That’s none of my concern.”

“Let me bring him out to the courtyard, then,” Santi said as he got to his feet. “The sunlight calms him.”

The Artifex’s sharp glare followed him toward the hall. “I don’t need him calm.”

“Are you certain? His fits can be truly frightful,” Santi said, letting his voice turn grave in what he thought was an inspired touch.  _ Let the old bastard mull that over. _

Chris sat waiting on the edge of the bed, his pajamas wrinkled and his hair wild. He’d heard every word. 

Santi offered his hands, and Chris took them, rising into Santi’s arms. “I’m sorry,” Santi whispered. “He won’t go. He insists on seeing you.”

Pushing back from Santi’s embrace, Chris shook his head and made a rude gesture in the direction of the door.

Chris leaned hard on Santi’s arm as they left the bedroom. Harder than he needed to, Santi knew, but the Artifex wouldn’t. Chris put on a convincing enough act of frailty that by the time Santi got him down the hall, he could not be certain what of it was real distress and what of it was feigned. The tremors in his hands were real, almost certainly, and the limp not. But the hollow, haunted expression on his face? The way he cringed against Santi’s side when the Artifex came into view? All too plausible.

The old man had, in fact, relocated to the courtyard, where he sat at the little table under the lemon tree. He’d taken the shadiest seat, naturally, but Santi didn’t much care. The sunlight really would do Chris some good.

“I’ve changed my mind about the coffee. I will have a cup,” the Artifex said as Santi helped Chris into a chair and draped a lightweight blanket around his shaking shoulders. Entirely excessive in the afternoon heat, but it created the right image, and Chris never seemed to mind.

Warm as the sun was, Santi felt a chill. The bastard wanted him out of the way, and there was nothing to be done about it.

Chris reached out and took hold of Santi’s arm as he stepped away. To the Artifex’s eyes, it must have looked like a desperate gesture. A display of fear. But Santi recognized the sequence of squeezes beneath the visible shaking of his partner’s hand as an old signal they’d used in war zones on stealth operations. Chris was all right.

“Easy now,” Santi said, loosening Chris’s hand from his arm and returning it to the arm of the chair. “I’ll be right back, love. I’ll bring you some tea.”

Chris let him go this time, the message delivered. When Santi looked back over his shoulder as he passed back through the door, Chris sat hunched over in his chair, arms wrapped around his stomach, looking as ill as Santi had ever seen him. The Artifex’s icy eyes glittered.

From the kitchen, Santi couldn’t catch what the Artifex was saying to Chris, but he could peek out through the window that looked out on the courtyard without calling attention to himself. The Artifex’s expression turned cold and cruel as he spoke to Christopher, his gloating contempt evident in expression and tone alike. In contrast, Chris looked dazed, disoriented. Briefly, he appeared to focus on the Artifex, only to abruptly turn his head to gaze into the distance with slack jaw and empty eyes. 

That seemed to anger the Artifex, who stood to clap his hands in front of Christopher’s face. Chris put his hands over his ears and cringed away as if frightened. It took all Santi’s will to remember that this was an act and keep himself from running to his lover’s rescue. He could only imagine how hard it had to be for a proud man like Chris to make himself look so helpless.

The kettle whistled, and Santi was forced to tear his eyes from the spectacle in the courtyard to prepare the coffee and tea. It felt like abandonment.

When he turned, tray in hand, something appeared to have shifted in Chris. He sat straight up, the blanket fallen from his shoulders, and stared at the Artifex with the intensity of a lion before its prey. The Artifex sat all the way back in his chair, probably not even aware he was putting as much distance as he could between himself and Christopher. His voice had turned louder, quicker, so that even from the kitchen, Santi could make out the words of the lecture he was giving on the restrictions that Chris was to be placed under.

Christopher Wolfe, accomplished research Scholar, would never be permitted to publish again. Santi couldn’t begin to imagine what Chris would do once he recovered, if not publish. It was as good as banning him from his work entirely. And that had to be the purpose of this visit. To crush Chris’s spirit with the knowledge that he had nothing to look forward to when he healed.

Someday, somehow, the Artifex would have to pay for this.

Santi strode out to the table and set down the tray as if the scene before him were entirely normal.

The Artifex broke off his lecture when Santi came through the door, and when Santi put his cup before him, he asked, with a jerk of his chin toward Chris, “Is he always like this?” The contempt was thick enough in his tone that Santi was amazed he didn’t choke on it. Not so much as a word of thanks for the coffee.

“At times,” Santi said. With only two chairs at the little table, he was left without a seat, so he picked up his own coffee to drink standing beside Chris, who continued to stare at the Artifex, ignoring his cup of tea. “He can be unpredictable. We ought to switch to a more soothing topic of conversation. He’s looking agitated.”

At that cue, Chris started to shake harder. His knee bumped against the table leg, making waves in his teacup.

“Agitated!” The Artifex scoffed. “And, what, you expect me to coddle him?” He turned his icy glare on Chris. “Would you have me coddle you, Christopher? Is that what you’re reduced to?”

Meeting the Artifex’s eyes with his unnerving stare, Chris raised his left hand, the hand he used to write with, the hand with two fingers still splinted, and made an unmistakable gesture. Held it there, even as his hand shook.

Fury twisting his wrinkled face, the Artifex arose, moving around the table as he snarled, “You dare? You dare insult me?”

Santi moved into his path. “Sir, please. He isn’t himself. He does it to me, too, when he gets in these moods.”

Chris made another gesture, equally obscene, that might have been directed at Santi. But, of course, with the Artifex standing so close, there was no way to tell.

“Stand aside, soldier. If this miserable waste of breath thinks I can no longer punish him-”

With a shriek somewhere between rage and terror, Chris flung his teacup in the Artifex’s direction. Or Santi's direction. Convenient, really, that they stood so close together. Had Chris been in good health, such a throw would have hit the wall easily. The cup landed on the ground not far behind the Artifex, splashing steaming tea onto his fine silk robes.

The Artifex froze, stunned.

Chris picked up the Artifex’s coffee cup and stood on shaky legs, the liquid in the cup sloshing over the sides of the cup as he held it in both hands.

Quickly, Santi moved to take the cup from Chris’s hands and wrap Chris in his arms, holding him every bit as tightly as he would have if this were real. Chris might not be caught in a fit of madness, but he needed comfort all the same. “Shh, easy now. You’ll be all right,” he murmured.

After a moment, Santi looked back at the Artifex, who had backed up several steps, angling toward the door. “You should go, sir,” Santi said while Chris trembled and pretended to sob against his chest. “It’s going to take a while to get him calmed down again. He won’t hear a thing you have to say to him now.”

For emphasis, Chris let out another mad cry, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. For both their sakes, Santi hoped he was covering genuine laughter.

“I think I have seen enough,” the Artifex said with a sneer that almost covered his unease. “You should consider an asylum for him, Captain. I will send my recommendations to your Codex.” With that, he departed, slamming the front door behind himself.

When the clatter of his steam carriage moved off down the street, Santi stepped back to hold his partner at an arm’s length, searching his face. “All right, love?”

Nodding, Chris offered him a weak smile. He waved his hand, less shaky now that the Artifex had gone, toward the ruin of the teacup.

“I did like that cup,” Santi said with mock offense.

Chris laughed, and Santi pulled him closer again to kiss his forehead.

“It was worth it,” Santi said softly. “You gave that old bastard a good fright. Did you see what a hurry he was in to get out of here?”

The smile on Chris’s face widened to a victorious grin that made his eyes sparkle.

Santi found himself returning that grin, relieved to know his partner had gotten at least some enjoyment out of playing the madman. “Come on,  _ amore mio _ ,” he said, offering his arm. “Let’s get you cleaned up. There’s coffee all over you.”


	10. Reading Aloud

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Weeks after his return home, Wolfe and Santi spend what should be a quiet, pleasant day together, but Wolfe is still frustrated by the things he can't do.
> 
> No warnings for this chapter. Nice, healing fluff with a side of prickly Wolfe here.

It was Nic’s day off. Wolfe knew because Nic was still there when he woke, sitting in the bed with a book and reading by the light from the open windows. The presence of so much sunlight in the bedroom meant it had to be nearing noon. Smells of coffee and cinnamon tickled his nose, and when he sat up to reach for the tray on the bedside table, Nic was there with kisses and steady hands to help him fill his mug from the steaming pot.

The night must have been bad for Nic if the coffee was still hot so late in the morning. That was the only way to know sometimes. Nic would never say a thing about it, never admit how many times he’d been woken by screams and thrashing in the bed beside him. The night was always bad for Wolfe.

Today, at least, the nightmares were already gone when he opened his eyes, the memories already slipping beneath the surface while he sipped his coffee and bit into a piece of coffee cake large enough for three men. He ate slowly, savored the decadence of the moist cake topped with cinnamon sugar crumbs and the rich, strong coffee, thick with cream. It was always cream now, never just milk. His stomach felt ready to burst by the time he’d eaten the last bite of the cake, but he still picked up crumbs from the plate with fingers that annoyed him with their crooked, shaky clumsiness. The nails were growing back and the splints were off, but they still didn’t work the way they should.

Nic sat with him in silence while he ate, close but not quite touching. The book remained open in his lap, but Wolfe doubted he was still reading. He didn’t offer to help beyond refilling the coffee mug, but his eyes were watchful, and his hands twitched in his lap while Wolfe fumbled with the last crumbs. Wolfe ignored that; it didn’t merit a glare.

When Wolfe was finished eating, Nic took the tray and got up, leaving his book on the bed. “Need any more?”

Wolfe shook his head. At the moment, he couldn’t even imagine being hungry for dinner, though he knew his appetite would come back soon enough. His body had to rebuild itself after months of deprivation. For now, he was content with the feeling of fullness and the lingering sugar on his tongue, still a luxury even after weeks at home.

“I was thinking we might go outside for the afternoon,” Nic said as he walked toward the door. “The weather is good, so you could have some exercise if you feel like it, or we can sit and read.” He stopped in the doorway and turned to look at Wolfe. “What do you think?”

Exercise these days usually meant painful stretches and the lifting of embarrassingly light weights that exhausted Wolfe in so short a time that it hardly seemed worth the trouble of beginning. He missed their old combat exercises and the walk to the Lighthouse and up the stairs to… That wasn’t a thought worth pursuing, so he shoved it aside. Combat exercises, though, were worth considering. 

With hands that he hoped looked steady to Nic, he signed, “Swords? Knives?” He knew the signs for fencing and knife throwing, but he wasn’t sure if Nic did. Nic’s knowledge of signs was mostly limited to a small subset used by the High Garda for tactical communication. Having discovered that Wolfe could usually work around his block on speaking by using his hands instead of his voice, they both were learning more, but Nic was slower to pick up languages.

He could see the decision play itself out on his partner’s face. The light in his eyes at the suggestion of doing something they used to enjoy together, the slight frown at the idea of deviating from the Medica-recommended exercises. “Let’s do the weights first, then we can try some foil drills,” Nic said, looking hopefully at Wolfe for approval.

Wolfe nodded. It was a reasonable compromise. He watched Nic leave for the kitchen, then hauled himself out of bed and into clothes.

A short while later, his sweat-drenched clothes clung to his skin and the foil shook so hard in his hand that Nic stepped in to take it from him. Nic hadn’t even picked up his own foil; he’d only run Wolfe through a series of basic footwork drills in an extremely thorough demonstration of just how broken Wolfe still was. 

It all felt wrong, like he was inhabiting some stranger’s body without any of the muscle memory of his own. No, that wasn’t it. The memory was there, but the muscles themselves were all wrong.

He pushed aside the hand that Nic offered to him. His legs weren’t wobbling so badly that he couldn’t make it to the bench to sit. Nic said something about how well he’d done, but Wolfe ignored the empty praise, and Nic retreated to the house with promises of fresh clothes and cold drinks.

The sun beat down on the little courtyard, making Wolfe wish he’d collapsed onto one of the chairs under the shade of the lemon tree instead. Walking there now was unthinkable, short as the distance was. It would have been nice to strip off his sweaty shirt, at least, but even if he thought his hands up to the task, he couldn’t expose his scars to so much sun. It could damage the healing skin, especially the burns.

By the time Nic returned, Wolfe was irritable enough to be disgusted by his own gratitude. There was no reason to look at the pitcher on the tray in Nic’s hand and the bundle of black fabric under Nic’s arm as if they were gifts from the heavens.

“Want help changing? Nic asked, putting the tray down on the little table beside the bench.

Wolfe glared at his partner. Of course he didn’t _ want _ help. But what he wanted was rarely relevant anymore. Feeling like a helpless child, he lifted his arms to allow Nic to pull the sweat-soaked shirt off of him. A moment of warm sun on bare skin, and then Nic replaced the shirt with another made of the same soft, lightweight cotton. It fit him loosely, but then, most things did these days. He refused to go to the ridiculous trouble of buying new clothes to fit a size he had no intention of remaining.

If getting into a clean shirt was unpleasant, getting into clean pants and underwear was truly humiliating. His legs refused to hold him upright unassisted, leaving him leaning hard on the back of the bench with trembling arms while Nic knelt beside him to tug sweaty clothes down and pull clean ones up. There was nothing quite like having his lover’s face mere inches from his bottom and seeing not lust on his face, but pity.

He pushed Nic’s hands away when Nic tried to help him sit back down, and Nic stepped back to pour red liquid from the pitcher into a glass. For the briefest instant, Wolfe hoped it might be wine, but his nose told him it was juice. Just another reminder that he was still in need of all the nutrition he could get; he couldn’t even drink plain water after exercise anymore. Nic sat down beside him and held out the glass, and Wolfe’s hand trembled as he reached out to take it, imagining what it would be like to throw it across the courtyard.

Embarrassing, no doubt. He’d be lucky to throw it past his own feet. Hard as he was shaking, Nic would just think he’d dropped it by accident. He settled for an irritated scowl as Nic helped him lift the glass to his lips to drink. He could spit the overly sweet liquid out, he supposed - that would get the point across - but the instincts honed by a year of hunger and thirst were too strong. The juice touched his tongue, and he gulped it down, not stopping until the glass was empty.

Nic put the empty glass down and offered him a plate of sliced fruit. Wolfe wasn’t particularly hungry, but he took a slice of melon to chew on while Nic massaged his legs, soothing the overworked muscles. It should have relaxed him, but it only irritated him more. He didn’t want to need any of it as much as he did. He took a savage bite of the melon and ground his teeth into it, though it was too soft to be a satisfying outlet for his anger.

When the urge to kick his partner away grew near overpowering, he tapped Nic’s shoulder and signed, “Stop.”

Nic’s brow furrowed, but he took his hands off Wolfe’s thigh and sat back. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he almost kept the hurt from his voice. “Would you like to read? I brought the Basho you started yesterday.”

There was the Blank on the tray, set carefully to the opposite side from the plate and the pitcher. Nic’s hands, Wolfe thought with bitter jealousy, were steady enough to ensure that nothing would spill on it as he carried it out. His own hands barely managed the task of picking up the heavy volume and opening it to the page he’d left off on.

He didn’t have his reading glasses on, but the Japanese calligraphy on the page should have been large enough to read without them. The letters blurred, and he squinted, leaning down over the book in his lap. His eyes were getting worse.

A flash of movement to his side startled him from his concentration. He jumped, but it was only Nic, offering his reading glasses.

That was all he could take. With a wordless cry of frustration, he swatted Nic’s hand away and shoved the book from his lap, onto the dusty path. He felt a twinge of guilt at that, quickly replaced by more anger. The Library had destroyed all of his original works. Why should he give a Blank more consideration than that?

Refusing to look Nic in the eye, he pushed himself to the end of the bench, as far from his partner as he could get. When he’d had a little longer to recover from the workout, he could get up and storm into the bedroom to be alone with his rage.

Nic picked the book up. Dusted it off. “Shall I read to you, then?” he asked. He took out his Codex and opened it. Running his finger down the page, he continued, “I can’t read this edition, but I saw a student edition listed when I loaded this one for you. There it is.”

Pages turned. Nic spoke. There was not so much as a shred of meaning in the words that issued forth from his mouth. The accent resembled no language known to humanity, a horrid bastardization of Italian, Greek, and Japanese. The rhythm was that of a broken steam carriage trying and failing to start. He was doing it on purpose. He had to be doing it on purpose. A drunk who’d never seen Japanese before could have done better.

Wolfe glared down at the cobblestones. He wasn't about to let Nic win him over with this ridiculous clowning.

It would have worked. Before. When he could have offered sarcastic commentary on the reading. When he could have pointed out Nic’s errors and heard him improve. Now it was just another reminder of the things Wolfe was too broken to have, and there was no amusement to be found in that.

Nic went on, briefly pausing after each poem, as if to leave room for the criticism Wolfe could no longer offer. Occasionally a real word escaped his lips. Not often, but just enough that Wolfe could almost grasp the shape of a line, if not a whole poem.

That was irritating. If Nic was going to insist on this mockery of reading, Wolfe at least wanted to know what he was failing so terribly at. He lifted his head and inched over, just enough to see the page. Thoth help him, the book had not only furigana but transliterations in the Greek and Latin alphabets. A child could have managed to pronounce the poems at least intelligibly.

_ You sound like a new soldier stumbling out of the Hive on his first night in Alexandria. It is supposed to be an even, meditative rhythm, not a race through the first three syllables followed by what sounds like a round of vigorous coughing, but is, I think, an attempt at reading the remainder of the line. This is not fucking Italian; if it rhymes, you are doing it wrong. _

He had to admit that there was a certain satisfaction in imagining what he would say if his voice were to obey him again.

Nic read the next poem, and as he did, Wolfe followed along, letting his lips form the shapes of the words, the correct pronunciation so clear in his mind he could almost hear it.

_ “Furu ike ya _

_ Kawazu tobikomu _

_ Mizu no oto” _

At the end of the poem, Nic paused, but this time his silence seemed heavier, rippling like the water in the final line. 

“What? Has it finally dawned on you how thoroughly embarrassing this performance has been?”

Nic wasn’t looking at the book anymore. His eyes were fixed on Wolfe, watching him the way one might watch a wild creature while trying to tempt it nearer with some morsel of food. As if he were waiting for Wolfe to…

To speak. Of course. He’d spoken aloud. He had all but resigned himself to the impossibility of that ever happening again, assumed his capacity for speech as thoroughly destroyed as his research. But he had spoken. Without even meaning to, he had spoken.

Naturally, that meant that when he opened his mouth to tell Nic to stop looking so worried, the words wouldn’t come, and he sat there with his mouth hanging open like a fool.

Leaving the book in his lap, Nic clasped Wolfe’s hands in his own and moved closer until their foreheads touched. “Chris…” he said, soft and gentle, “Sssh. Don’t force it. One step at a time, remember?”

One step at a time was too slow. He wanted to tell Nic that, too, but aggravatingly, Nic was right. When he tried to form the words, they froze in his throat, and his chest tightened until it was hard to breathe. He was going to throw himself into a fit of panic if he kept this up.

He didn’t want that. Much as he hated giving up, it was better than falling apart. With a heavy sigh that would have to suffice to convey his frustration, he slumped against his partner, letting his head fall on Nic’s shoulder as Nic caught him in a secure embrace.

“I know, _ amore mio _, I know,” Nic said, kissing the top of Wolfe’s head. “Just breathe now. Rest.”

It shouldn’t have felt so good just to squeeze Nic’s hand while he filled his lungs and then wordlessly let the air out again. Tears of mingled frustration and relief burned in his eyes, but he held them back. He was not going to fall that far today.

Nic let Wolfe’s hair free from the cord that tied it back and ran his fingers slowly through it. Such a simple pleasure, but one that quieted the roiling mass of tension within him. He could lose himself in the gentle rhythm of it, breathing in time with the motion of Nic’s hand and letting his thoughts drift away.

“I could ask for no greater gift than what you’ve just given me,” Nic said after a while, with a hitch in his voice. “I missed hearing you read. I missed your scolding, too. It’s been too quiet this past year.” 

Wolfe lifted his head, looking up to meet his lover’s watery eyes. There were words in his mind - apologies, endearments, lectures - but the only thing that would come to his tongue was a single, wavering syllable. “Nic.”

“Chris.” Nic let out a shaky sigh and leaned in for a kiss that ended far too soon. “I’m sorry. I sound like I’m pushing you, don’t I? That isn’t what I want. I want you to heal. I’m not asking you to push yourself too hard. Just… just know that when you are ready to talk, I will be here to listen.”

“Nic.” The name was like wine in his mouth. A richer, sweeter wine than he had tasted in a long time. Intoxicated by the heady rush of saying it, he pressed on. “Niccolo, my love...”

His voice broke, a sob welling up in place of the declaration of adoration he had intended. The tears he’d tried to hold back overflowed, but he couldn’t be ashamed of them, not when Nic’s stubbly cheeks, too, were damp.

Nic pulled him close and held him tight against his chest. “Oh, my dear Christopher, I love you, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Japanese is a nice, straightforward language in terms of grammar and pronunciation, but its writing system is on the complicated side. It uses a combination of Chinese characters and two syllabaries (think alphabet, but each letter represents a syllable), which can be a lot for a beginner to handle. Wikipedia has a decent overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system
> 
> The edition of the poetry book that Wolfe is using is, of course, mirrored from Basho's original handwritten book, and it is written in calligraphy, which would be very pretty but impossible for someone unfamiliar with the language to read. The student edition Santi reads from has a few features to make it easier. First, there are furigana, which are small syllabic letters written either alongside or above (depending on whether the text is vertical or horizontal) the Chinese characters to show how to pronounce them. Note that this would not help in the least with meaning, but someone who can read the syllabary could read it out loud whether they understood it or not. The Greek and Latin transliterations would help even more with this, allowing even a student who can't read the Japanese syllabary to pronounce the poems. Features like this are common in beginner-level Japanese textbooks.
> 
> In short, Santi is not reading so badly because of genuine inability. He is trolling Wolfe, trying to get a laugh out of him.
> 
> Sadly, I do not know of an actual edition of Basho's poetry with these features.  
You can, however, find a whole lot of translations of the haiku that Wolfe and Santi read together here: http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm  
It's possibly the most famous Japanese poem, and Santi is being a gigantic troll to mangle it.


	11. Forgiveness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A storm makes Wolfe's pain flare up, and with it, Santi's guilt. Massages for Wolfe help them both feel better.
> 
> Some references to Wolfe's injuries and chronic pain, but no flashbacks. Lots of comfort.

It had become disturbingly easy to tell when Christopher was in pain. Not because he said anything about it; even as he spoke more easily with each passing day, he didn’t complain. Not about that, at least. But the signs were there. On some days they were subtle: a slight change in posture, the hint of a limp, a grimace there and gone. On others, they were more pronounced. Rarely were they absent entirely.

Chris hurt. That was simply a facet of his life now, and Santi ached to see his beloved so resigned to it.

This looked like it would be one of the worse days. Santi was scheduled to be at the training grounds early, and he’d woken before dawn to the sight of Chris curled in a tight ball on the bed, the way he often did when the dreams were bad. He had his arm tucked beneath his pillow at an angle that would have made him sore even before the hell he’d been through all too recently. It didn’t take even that much provocation to make his shoulders hurt now.

Before, Santi would have moved him into a more comfortable position. Rolled him over, maybe gotten a sleepy kiss for the trouble, maybe gotten a pillow thrown at him for it, and either way been glad to have helped. Now, though, the calculations were more complex. The quiet, if tense, slumber Chris lay in looked to be the best he’d had in days. He might have been in that position long enough for the aches to have already set in. Santi couldn’t justify the risk of waking him when he couldn’t be certain it would do any good.

Santi was just about done with his morning coffee when Chris shuffled down the hall, his shoulders hunched and his face scrunching up each time he put a foot down, a hand against the wall for balance. Santi knew better than to say anything. Chris would insist it was only stiffness that he needed to walk off.

While Chris disappeared into the bathroom, Santi went to the kitchen, and by the time Chris emerged, Santi had a cup of coffee and a plate of biscotti waiting for him. “Want anything else?” he asked while Chris sat down. Chris shook his head, but at the sight of the pained look on his face, Santi couldn’t help adding, “Maybe a pain pill?”

Chris glared at him, but he’d expected as much. Chris had weaned himself off pain medication well ahead of the Medica’s recommended schedule, and even before he’d started speaking again, he’d been very clear in his dislike for the pills. He hadn’t explained, but Santi’s imagination eagerly supplied possible reasons, all horrible to contemplate.

“Just need to stretch,” Chris said. “Don’t worry.”

Speech before coffee was a good sign, and Santi let it soothe his worries. If Chris was in a good enough mental state to say he would stretch out his sore muscles, he was in a good enough state to actually do so.

“I’ll try,” Santi said, bending to place a kiss on his partner’s cheek. “I should be home early. We’re scheduled to be out on the field, and it looks like rain. Take care of yourself, love.”

Chris tipped his face up for another kiss, and Santi granted it, letting his fingers take a quick pass through Chris’s tangled hair. He would worry. That was inevitable. But he didn’t have to tell Chris about it. He just had to get through his work and hurry home.

* * *

EPHEMERA

**Excerpt from the personal journal of Scholar Christopher Wolfe.**

**Interdicted to the Black Archives.**

_ Nic tries not to wake me when he gets up for work. He shuts off his alarm on the first ring and he moves slowly as he gets out of bed. If we ever had the glows off, I suspect he would even dress himself in the dark. But we will not turn off the glows. _

_ I cannot abide the dark. In the dark, my mind fills in what my eyes cannot perceive, and inevitably I see stone walls. Bars. Chains. Inevitably, I remember. _

_ In the mornings, especially, I do not always know the real aches from the memories. Sleep blurs every line I have drawn between past and present, and when I wake, I must draw them again, one by one. I must classify the pains and assign them to their proper places, shut the memories up in their vaults, before I can get on with the business of the day, what little that may be. _

_ I have come to know pain well enough that I might, were I permitted to do so, publish a taxonomy of it. I might expound on the myriad causes and forms that I have had the misfortune of observing. Today alone, I might record some half dozen. _

_ Most were memories. I will not give those more substance by putting them to paper. But there are two that I might categorize as real, or at least existing in the present.  _

_ There is the sharp, stabbing sensation that comes when feet are first put to the floor after waking. It has no physical cause. Any injuries to that area are long since healed, but it is as if the body has grown so accustomed to hurting that it refuses to acknowledge its recovered state. Most days, a bit of walking is enough to persuade the feet that they are not, in fact, injured. But today it lingers. _

_ And there is the soft, warm ache, deep in the joints and bones. It has no shortage of causes: too much time spent in the wrong position, too much or too little exercise, troubled sleep, a shift in the weather. It waxes and wanes, it shifts from one part to another, but it rarely leaves entirely. Stretching and shifting positions can be of some use in dispelling it, but there is significant risk that what cures it in one place will only drive it to another. If it would only leave my hands alone, I might learn to accept it as the old friend it is becoming. _

_ Gods, this is becoming illegible. Time to give the left a rest. The right cannot yet produce recognizable letters, so I must return to the mind-numbing drudgery of writing workbooks. Nic will be home soon, I hope, to put an end to that toil. _

* * *

The rain obliged in putting an early end to the day’s training, granting Santi leave to return home. There had been a time when he would have been disappointed to have to end early, but he couldn’t enjoy his work the way he used to. It was impossible to laugh and joke with the troops when he knew Chris was alone and hurting at home. Impossible to take pride in his work when he knew himself to be a coward who had failed to protect the Scholar who mattered most.

Despite the storm, he took his time opening the door. A slow turn of the key in the lock, a gradual swing of the door, a cautious step across the threshold. Christopher could be so easily startled. 

Still seated in the same place he’d been that morning, Chris looked up, a flicker of a smile on his face. “You could have waited,” Chris said, indicating the rain outside with a sweep of his hand. His right hand, which held a pen. His left curled around a cup of tea.

“I missed you,” Santi said, bending to unlace his boots. The task was one he probably could manage in his sleep, and he couldn’t resist looking up to assess the scene before him while his fingers did their work on the laces.

On the surface, Chris seemed well. He was upright. He was speaking. He had a handwriting practice book open on the table before him, one of the ones Santi had picked up from the Temple of Thoth for him. The priests there gave the things away freely and without question, seeing the promotion of good handwriting as an act of devotion, and maybe Chris felt the same. He wouldn't touch the worksheets the Library provided through the Codex, but he was most of the way through this book.

Santi was relieved to see Christopher’s journal on the table, too, set off to the side by a stack of Blanks. It could only be good for him to write about the thoughts that so haunted him, and so much writing in one day had to mean his hands were making progress toward recovery.

But there was the hunch of his shoulders, more pronounced than it had been that morning. And his fingers lay so crooked on the teacup. He wasn't even trying to hold them straight. Easy enough to piece the story together from there: hours spent at the table, writing with one hand until it grew too sore to go on, and then switching hands and writing until the other was worn out as well. Maybe a break to read, then, holding the mug in both hands until the heat sank in deep enough to drive back the pain, allowing the cycle to begin again. All while the ache in his shoulders built, probably creeping down his back.

It hurt to see, and that must have shown on Santi’s face, because Chris looked down at the page before him and said, “It isn’t so bad.”

That reassurance might as well have been a knife to the heart. It served as a reminder that Christopher now rated his pain in comparison to the torture Santi had failed to save him from.

Santi tried to push those thoughts aside as he stripped off his dripping uniform. “The stretches didn’t help, then?”

“Didn’t do them.” Chris’s pen resumed its scratching across the page. Under his breath he added, “Damned useless feet.”

That, at least, was a problem that could be addressed, along with the other aches. “Take a bath with me?” Santi asked, thinking of how good it would feel to hold Chris in the warm water. At the very least, a long soak would do Chris some good. At best… 

“ _ No _ .” 

The force of Christopher’s response tore Santi’s pleasant fantasies away, leaving guilt to crush down on him. Though Chris usually liked baths, this wouldn’t be the first time he refused one since his return. It could be a fear of getting too comfortable, which sometimes stirred up his memories. But it was all too easy to imagine other reasons for that reaction. Things that might have been done to him.

“Sorry,” Santi said, leaving his wet clothes on the floor to move in and rub his partner’s shoulders, now shaking with tension. “What about a massage? Would that be better?”

His shoulders relaxing a little, Chris tipped his head back to rest against Santi’s stomach. “Yes. We can do that. But let me finish this page?”

Santi knew better than to argue that. Christopher never liked to leave work unfinished, and Santi couldn’t complain about having a moment to change into dry trousers and retrieve a bottle of massage oil. 

Returning to the front room to find Chris still writing, Santi froze in his tracks, his breath catching in his throat at the beauty of the sight. From this angle, Chris was framed by the window that looked out on the courtyard, the storm raging behind him as he gazed down at the book with the intense focus that Santi had always admired. His stormcrow, dressed all in black. A study in curves and angles, sharp bones and flowing hair. Still too thin, still too pale, but still every bit the man who had captured Santi’s heart so many years ago. Friends might tease him for being such a hopeless romantic, but Santi was glad that even after everything they’d been through, together and apart, the sight of his beloved could still take his breath away.

With Chris still hard at work, the obvious choice was to start by massaging his feet. A partial turn of the chair made space enough for Santi to position himself on his knees before Chris while allowing Chris to write. Contentment settled over him as he opened the massage oil and breathed in the sandalwood scent that Chris so liked. With his hands coated in it, he gently, reverently lifted his lover’s bare foot and rubbed his thumbs over the sole, seeking the source of the pain.

Perhaps it was the inevitable outcome of his Catholic upbringing that he found the position so comfortable. That his mind focused itself so easily on the task of offering this humble service. When he thought about it, comparisons might be drawn between this act and the example Christ himself set. Foot massage and foot washing were not so very different, and Santi had long favored the interpretation that Jesus and John were lovers. Priests might call it blasphemous, but he’d committed far worse sins in his life than blasphemy.

Christopher’s voice, warm and soft, pulled Santi from his thoughts. “Stop it.” The words sounded affectionate, teasing even.

Still, Santi took his hands from his partner’s foot, and there was an apology on his lips as he looked up.

The smile on Chris’s face, no less real for the pain that lurked beneath it, was a relief to see. “Not that,” Chris said. With a hand warm from his teacup, he caressed Santi’s cheek. “Stop looking at me like I’m your God.”

Returning his partner’s smile, Santi answered as he had many times before, “If God didn’t want me to see Him in my lover, He shouldn’t have given me a man named Christopher.”

“A flimsy excuse, as always.”

“Would you prefer one with more textual support?” Santi replied, turning to kiss his partner’s palm as he resumed the foot massage. “Matthew is very clear that to care for others is to care for God." Bending over his lover’s foot, he punctuated his words with a trail of kisses from toes to ankle.

Pagan though he was, Chris knew the Bible as well as any other text of such historical significance, and Santi was not at all surprised when his partner responded with a quote. “ _ Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. _ ” In the past, that might have been the beginning of a lively debate, but a thoughtful expression came over Christopher’s face as he spoke, and the only commentary he offered was another gentle touch to Santi’s cheek.

Santi was not accustomed to winning so easily. The silence seemed like a challenge, and letting it go was as much an act of devotion as the care he was giving his partner’s feet. Chris had already spoken more than usual for a day. To push him to speak further would be to hurt him, and he was already hurting so much.

In the quiet, Santi could hear another line from that same passage, one that echoed the guilt eating away at his heart.  _ In prison, ye visited me not _ . He had given up, abandoned Chris to that hell.

He remembered the way Christopher’s feet had looked the night he came back, as if from the dead. Bloody, swollen and torn. In his mind’s eye, he could still see those injuries, an image overlaying the healthy foot in his hands.

With tender reverence, he kissed the places where those wounds had been, each kiss a plea for forgiveness. He found the places where soreness lingered, and he rubbed it away, each stroke imbued with adoration. These were the feet that had walked beside him through war zones and Serapeums. Feet so close in size to his own that they shared his boots. Feet that had endured pain beyond reckoning and still carried Chris home to him.

He could not erase that suffering. He did not deserve forgiveness for his failure to prevent it. But he knelt before Christopher like the sinner he was, and he offered all the comfort that hands and lips could give. When he had done all he could for one foot, he moved on to the other. He massaged from toes to heel, he kissed every half-grown nail, and he wished he could believe it would be enough to heal the damage he had failed to prevent.

Christopher’s hand came to rest on the top of his head, and it felt like a benediction. “Nic, love.” Two of Chris’s fingers trailed down along Santi’s jaw, stopping beneath his chin to tip his face upward.

Even with that touch, Santi found he couldn’t look his partner in the eye. His gaze fixed on the hand that rested in Chris’s lap, its sore and crooked fingers. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Niccolo,” Chris said, stern but affectionate.

Another upward nudge to his chin brought Santi’s eyes up to see a smile that offered him undeserved absolution.

“Tell me,” Chris said, cupping his cheek. “What are you sorry for?”

Santi leaned into the touch, closing his eyes. “When you disappeared, I-” His voice caught, and he had to swallow the lump forming in his throat before he could continue. “I tried to find you. I asked, and when they asked me to stop, I kept asking, and asking, but… but then…” Unthinking, his hand went to his chest, where the line of scars stood out in constant reminder of his failure. “I gave up.”

It sounded so pathetic when he said it. He’d been weak. Foolish. Helpless.

Gentle fingers traced the line of scars on his chest. “I know,” Chris said. His hand met Santi’s own, held it.

Rain pounded down on the roof, almost loud enough to drown out the soft hiss of pain that escaped Christopher as he shifted forward in his seat to wrap an arm around Santi, pulling him close. Far more tenderly than Santi deserved, his lips pressed to the top of Santi’s head.

“You did nothing wrong, my love,” Chris said in a voice soft with sorrow. “You could never have saved me from that place. They would only have killed you for trying.”

That was no justification. He was a soldier; he had risked his life for less important things. “I should have found a way,” Santi said, head bowed. “Forgive me,  _ amore mio _ , I failed you.”

“Nic. Love.” With visible strain, Chris sat upright again, clasping Santi’s hand in his. “There is nothing to forgive. But if my forgiveness is what you need, it is yours.”

Relief and guilt warring within him, Santi kissed his lover’s hand. Kissed it again, softly, on the pink line of a scar that ran across the back of Chris’s hand. “Oh, Chris…”

“Shh, love, I know. You’ll feel better with penance to do, won’t you? Such a Catholic,” Chris said with fond exasperation. Smiling, he spread his fingers, offering his hand to Santi’s attentions. “Go on, then. Let this be your restitution.”

Turning his lover’s hand over to kiss the palm, Santi whispered, “Thank you.” Lifting his head only enough to give his hands room to work, he circled his thumbs over Christopher’s palm. No scars there; the pain lurked beneath the surface. It would be so easy to overlook the cramped muscles there, but Santi knew from years of doing this for Chris where the aches would be.

There was something deeply soothing about massaging Christopher’s hands for him again. It brought back memories of bringing coffee to his partner’s desk when Chris worked late into the night, coaxing him to rest and rubbing the cramps from his hands while listening to the progress of whatever project Chris was working on. Then, Chris could write all day and only find himself moderately sore. Then, his hands had produced books and papers, sketches and inventions.

They would do those things again. Whatever it took, Santi would see his beloved fully restored.

It hurt to see them in their current state, but that made it a fitting act of penance. He had no choice but to look upon the consequences of his failure. As he had with Chris’s feet, he made each touch a prayer. He prayed for forgiveness as he massaged fingers that he had seen broken not so long ago. All of them now mended. Even as he remembered the wounds, he couldn’t help but see the healing.

_ Broken bones heal twice as strong _ , he’d told Chris. He heard Chris mutter it still, on bad nights. 

Santi kissed the places where the breaks had been, now invisible beneath the skin. He kissed the fingers he had splinted, now healed well enough to hold a pen again. He kissed the bony knuckles and remembered just how much thinner his partner had been just weeks ago. Somewhere between the right hand and the left, he found that his prayers were as much in thanks as in remorse. Chris was healing, and he could not deny his own role in that.

Genius that he was, Christopher had set Santi to a task that made him see not only his failure, but also the success that had come after.

With a final kiss to the inside of his lover’s wrist, Santi looked up to see Chris watching him. There was a tightness in his posture still, but aside from that, he looked at ease. Content, even. And then he smiled. A small smile, but warm. A ray of light from the heavens.

“Will you accept my forgiveness now, dear sinner?” Chris asked. “Or will you require more acts of penance?” Flexing his fingers, he reached out to stroke Santi’s cheek.

Returning his lover’s smile, Santi accepted the touch and the forgiveness that came with it. “Your grace is yours to give, dear Christopher. I cannot refuse what you freely offer.” Forgiving himself would not be so easy, but there was no need to tell Chris that. “But my work is unfinished. I owe your shoulders attention yet, if you will permit my devotions.”

“Hmm.” There was too much amusement beneath the look of scrutiny Chris gave him for those narrowed eyes to intimidate. “Very well. I will allow you to stroke my ego along with my body, if it pleases you.”

Santi bowed. “It will be my honor,  _ amore mio _ .”


	12. Hidden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wolfe is having a hard time, and Santi finds him hidden in the closet, shaking. There's nothing to do but wait it out.
> 
> (No detailed memories, but some serious mental health and relationship struggles are hinted at; this chapter starts a plot line that will involve suicidal thoughts and self harm.)

Chris was in the closet again. Christopher Wolfe, veteran of nine war zones, cowered in the back corner behind a curtain of hanging clothes, shaking. The worst part was that Santi was getting used to seeing his partner this way. He’d done it a lot in the beginning, when he’d recovered enough from the worst of his physical injuries. By now, Santi knew what to expect.

At best, whatever madness had driven Chris to the closet had already passed, and it was shame that kept Chris crouched and silent with his head in his hands. Santi would say his partner’s name, and Chris would stand, glare at him, and snap that he was fine. Things might go back to normal after that, with both of them pretending it hadn’t happened.

Just as likely, Chris was stuck in past or panic still. He might scream, struggle, even attack, when approached. He might come shaking and sobbing into Santi’s arms. There was no telling.

A careful approach would get the best results. “Chris,” Santi said softly. Slowly, so slowly, he pushed the suits and robes aside and took a step into the closet. Christopher was close enough to touch. Santi didn’t dare.

Chris whimpered. A thin, pathetic sound. He’d been curled so tightly already, but somehow he made himself even smaller, pressed himself tighter into the corner.

Santi’s stomach sank. This was what he feared the most. It was hard when Chris fought him, but there was still something of his Christopher in that wild, flailing man. Santi knew his lover’s anger well. His determination, his sharp edges. This cowering, whimpering Christopher was one he’d never known before.

There was a part of Santi that wanted to reach out, grab his lover by the shoulder and shake him back to his senses. A part that wanted to yell that the prison and the torturers were gone. A part that wanted to provoke Chris into fighting back.

It would go badly if he did. He knew that already. When he was like this, Chris wouldn’t fight. Santi could hit him and get nothing but whimpers and guilt for it. He still hadn’t forgiven himself for the one time he’d tried.

There was a part of Santi that wanted to comfort his shaking love, too, but affection would accomplish no more than anger. Chris would whimper and recoil from a gentle touch just as he would from a blow. He wouldn’t fight being held, but he would whine pitifully, and the look on his face…

Santi never wanted to see that look again. Twisted, painful, terrified. The way his face must have looked when they tortured him.

Slow and silent, he lowered himself to his knees in the closet doorway. This called for patience. Siege tactics. Hunker down, wait it out. Send out small, careful scouting missions.

“Christopher, love, I am here. I will keep watch. I will protect you." He kept his voice calm and even, barely above a whisper, a tone Chris found soothing. He spoke in Italian. Sometimes that made a difference. Chris had always liked to hear Santi's native language. 

There was no response, but he didn't expect one. It wouldn't be that easy. He turned away from his lover's trembling form, keeping watch as he'd promised, though he knew there was no danger.

He waited. Took deep, slow breaths. When he was in training, one of the lieutenants told him that if he slowed his own breathing, a panicking soldier would follow his lead. He didn't know if that was true, but it was better than nothing.

He tried not to listen to Christopher. After a little while, he laid a hand on the floor behind himself, not touching his partner, but within reach. "I am here, Chris. My hand is just behind you. You can hold my hand."

He waited. He breathed. Eleven long breaths before he heard movement. A soft rustle of fabric, a sharp breath, more rustling. Fearful panting and shivers of silk.

Santi didn’t have to look to see Chris’s arm slipping lower, reaching, snatching back. He could feel it, prickling at the edge of his awareness like the growing itch on the back of his neck. Years of training and battlefield missions kept him still. Impatient soldiers got shot.

He waited. Revised his plans for dinner while Chris shifted and fidgeted and shook behind him. There wouldn’t be time to cook much of anything at this rate. Spaghetti aglio e olio, maybe. They always had dried pasta on hand, and there might be a bit of prosciutto to throw in. A salad for the side, chocolates for dessert if Chris hadn’t found where they were hidden in the top cabinet. No wine, unless Chris insisted. It wouldn’t be good for him in this state.

The tip of a finger brushed Santi’s hand. He held his breath while it poked, probed, withdrew. Let Chris set the pace. Don’t startle him. Don’t push. Easier to think of the right thing to do than to do it, but he was a soldier. He was used to doing what needed to be done, feelings be damned.

Another poke. Then two fingers, walking their way across his palm until they rested against his wrist. Feeling his pulse.

Christopher’s hand came down like a falling feather to rest in Santi’s, palm to palm. Santi waited. Only when Chris’s fingers tightened around his hand and stayed there did he allow himself to ever so gently curl his own fingers upward to hold his partner’s hand.

They sat like that for some time, only their hands touching. Chris’s hand shook, but he didn’t let go. Santi mentally reviewed the next day’s duty rosters. He thought Chris’s breathing seemed a little calmer. He let himself hope.

He was most of the way through the second century’s postings when he heard a shuffle, and Christopher’s back pressed against his. They’d sat this way under fire more than a few times, squeezed into one bolt-hole or another, waiting for reinforcements or rescue.

There would be no rescue from this. Only patient waiting for the battle in Christopher’s mind to die down. It would have been easier if the fight had been real. Burners and smugglers could be shot. Armies could be forced to give some measure of respect to treaties.

Santi waited, no longer able to distract himself from the man seated at his back. He could feel every breath, every tremor. He could feel his lover’s hand all but crushing his own. Closer now to the surface of whatever depths his mind had dragged him to.

“I’m here, love. You are safe with me. Listen to me and breathe,” he said, offering the directions that had become so familiar to them both as a tether to pull Chris back to sanity.

Chris listened. He shook harder for a while, and his fingernails dug into Santi’s hand, but he inhaled and exhaled to the rhythm of Santi’s voice. The rest followed. Slowly. Santi wasn’t sure whether he was frustrated or grateful that he couldn’t see the clock.

The tremors stopped. Chris’s grasp on Santi’s hand loosened, and he stood, quite suddenly.

Santi stood with him, ready to turn, to offer his arms, but Chris pushed past him, a shiver running through his too-thin body as he stepped out into the bedroom.

“I’m fine,” he snapped, not meeting Santi’s eyes. “I don’t need your fussing. It’s done.”

Badly as the words stung, Santi kept his expression neutral. That, too, was a useful skill for a soldier. A clamor of thoughts fought for dominance in his head, but all he said was, “Glad to hear it.” That was true. Wounded pride was a sign that the madness had passed, even if Santi had to remind himself of how badly he’d missed his lover’s thorns when Chris had been weaker.

“I need a drink,” Chris muttered, and he stalked out of the room.

Fighting the urge to follow, Santi let out a long breath. Picking a fight wouldn’t have helped earlier, and it wouldn’t help now. Chris might be glad for the chance to let anger wash away his shame, but in the long run, that would only hurt.

Santi turned to straighten the clothes hanging in the closet. It was something to do.

Only then did he see the knife, unsheathed, its naked blade shining in the light that poured in through the open door.


End file.
